• May 10, 1999
• Vol. 51
• No. 17

Matthew Perry: Actor

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

"I used to cut myself like there's no tomorrow," says everybody's Friend Matthew Perry, enthusing about his Gillette Mach3 razor. "It was like a drive-by shaving, but I never have trouble now." It's little wonder that the man behind TV's irresistibly neurotic Chandler Bing gets lathered up about close cuts. His father, actor John Perry, was the rugged visage of Old Spice commercials. "He has the chiseled thing going," the younger Perry says with an envious sigh. But the 6-foot actor whom pals call Matty has his own charms. "It's his eyes. They're so blue," says castmate Lisa Kudrow. Courteney Cox Arquette, who plays Chandler's girlfriend Monica, falls for the laughs. "He's got a great heart and a great sense of humor," she says. "It's the perfect combination."

It wasn't always. In L.A.'s private Buckley School at age 15, "I was the coolest guy of the non-cool crowd," says Perry, who moved in with his remarried dad in L.A. after spending his early childhood with his former-model mother, Suzanne, in Ottawa. "We were the guys who made you laugh, but didn't get any dates." Nowadays the 29-year-old Perry, who has squired the likes of Julia Roberts and Yasmine Bleeth, is committed to staying tuned up for Ms. Right. He plays Wallyball (volleyball on a racquetball court) and lets fellow Friend Jennifer Aniston tend his hair ("I like it a little spiky and she always pushes it down"). But his biggest beauty secret is pride. He entered a drug rehab in 1997 for an addiction to painkillers, and emerged, he says, "healthier, which was a very difficult thing to do." Starring in the forth-coming Three to Tango with Dylan McDermott and Neve Campbell, Perry says, "I'm walking through the world pretty happy these days. Hopefully, I'm looking better as a result."