‘Friends’ actress thinks she received a sign from Matthew Perry via hawk

A year-and-a-half after his death from a drug overdose, Maggie Wheeler still very much misses Friends costar Matthew Perry.

The actress who played Chandler’s on-again, off-again love interest Janice, with her distinctive laugh and nasally voice, shared a moving moment that she had after the October 2023 death of Perry on Monday’s episode of the Still Here Hollywood with Steve Kmetko podcast.

“Lots of people talk about spirits showing up as birds and, you know, other things that kind of send a message when someone passes,” said Wheeler, who also lost her brother to addiction. “And after Matthew died, I was in a neighbor’s pool, and I was alone, and there was nobody else around. And I was on my back, and I was thinking about my brother. And I said, you know, ‘Look out for him,’ and two hawks flew over my head and flew past me. One circled around and came and got the other one, and it flew past me. So that was a beautiful moment, if you go for that kind of stuff.”

Wheeler appeared on 19 episodes, at least one on each of the NBC hit’s 10 seasons. While none of Chandler’s besties — Joey (Matt LeBlanc), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), and Ross (David Schwimmer) — could stand her, Chandler gravitated toward her when he was feeling down. The rest of the time, he was annoyed by her, too. The storyline perfectly fit into NBC’s Must-See TV hit.

“People all over the world who loved him as Chandler, who benefited from the joy that he spread by being a brilliant actor and by being so incredibly funny,” Wheeler said. “So the ripple, the wave was felt by so many. For me, I felt just heartbroken and sad that, you know, that he couldn’t make it out of this incredibly dark tunnel that he was in for so long. And if you read Matthew’s book or if you’ve read Matthew’s book, you know the level of his addiction was so profound.”

Perry was candid about his addiction in the 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. In it, he estimated that he had spent $7 million “trying to get sober.” He told the New York Times in October that year that the number was “$9 million or something” and that he had been clean for 18 months.

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Wheeler said that, while she had seen addiction struggle before, losing Perry still hurt.

“Even when you know the road somebody is on, the day you know they’re gone still comes as a surprise, even when you think you are preparing for it. And in Matthew’s case, he seemed to have turned a corner,” she said. “Things seem to have been going well in certain kinds of ways. There’s just that feeling of like the rug being pulled out.”

Since Perry’s death, five individuals have been charged in connection with it, and several have pleaded guilty.

Watch the full conversation above.