Eight years ago, Matthew Perry was ready to quit acting.

And he easily could have — 10 seasons of Friends had yielded him all the money he would ever need. He had created a character for the ages — a cultural touchstone — in Chandler Bing. Chandler was smart, wounded, sarcastic, professionally lost, parentally abandoned, and romantically fucked up. For members of Generation X, in their twenties and thirties as Friends aired, Chandler represented an alternative image of neurosis to Woody Allen's misogynist whiners. He even came with an infectious speech pattern of Perry's own creation.

But after Friends ended its decade-long run in spring 2004, Perry wanted to try something different. "I didn't want to play Chandler anymore," he remembered during an interview last week over lunch at a restaurant in Hollywood. "I wanted to do some things that changed it up a little bit." His persona hadn't necessarily translated as well on film — "I did about three movies that failed in a row," Perry said, "and then they stopped offering me movies." And offscreen, he had suffered through well-publicized struggles with alcohol and drugs.

That change he was seeking came in the form of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin's 2006 return to network television. Perry signed on to play the lead character, Matt Albie, a comedy writer who took over Studio 60, a topical late-night sketch comedy show, with his old friend Danny (Bradley Whitford). As with all Sorkin fiction, the talk was fast, and the stakes were high: In its single season, Studio 60 delved into the state of TV, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Afghanistan, the tenuousness of sobriety, a bomb threat over a Muhammed sketch, and — believe it or not — more.

Though he said that Studio 60 — all 22 episodes of which he recently rewatched after having dental surgery — was "definitely the best work I've ever done," it hadn't been an easy experience for Perry, an actor who was (and is currently with the CBS reboot of The Odd Couple, in which he plays Oscar Madison) used to contributing to the writing process. "Aaron Sorkin's dialogue was the best writing I'll ever have," he said. "But there were times when I had ideas, and they were sort of shut down."

And so after pouring himself into Studio 60, a drama that came with high expectations, and seeing it get canceled in 2007, he said he contemplated a life in which he would just "play video games."

"At the time, I thought, I'll just retire! I've won the lottery. I'll just hang out and do whatever I want," Perry said.

"But I have to work," he continued. "I have to be a person that's working." Listing his post-Friends efforts, he said, "Doing Go On was fun; doing Mr. Sunshine was fun; doing Studio 60 was a very interesting challenge, but fun. And doing The Odd Couple is fun.”

"When all of those shows were canceled, I was absolutely fine,” he continued. “I didn't shed a tear at all. I was ready for them to be done, even if some of them were good. When you get the network call saying you're canceled, I was, like, cool, no problem. The same thing would be true for The Odd Couple. I think I'm just lucky that I don't need it."

Despite the seeming contradiction between feeling compelled to work yet being detached from the work itself, Perry is obviously proud of The Odd Couple's success so far (it's the No. 1 new comedy of the season) and is fond of his colleagues from the show. ("This is how close we are: All of my texts are from the cast of The Odd Couple. Tom Lennon, Yvette Nicole Brown, they've all texted me during this interview.")

But having achieved the explosive fame he had always dreamed of beginning at age 24 with Friends, and then getting both the benefits of that celebrity as well as its nightmarish downsides, Perry appears to have a careful approach at age 45.

"Fame just didn't do exactly what I thought it would do," he said, in his even-toned voice, so different from Chandler's edge-of-hysteria cadence. "So it was sort of having all my dreams come true, but realizing they were the dreams of a 16-year-old. Not an adult's dreams. Does that make sense?"



