Matthew Perry

Chandler Bing was written as the funny friend and Matthew Perry turned him into something much more specific. Friends ran from 1994 to 2004 and brought him a first Primetime Emmy nomination in 2002, plus a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award shared with the rest of the cast, but the reason the character survived syndication is a delivery nobody else was doing on network television at the time.

The technique was stress. Where the rest of the cast played jokes on faces, Perry played them on auxiliary verbs, hitting the word nobody hits and turning a flat line into a wince. It made sarcasm sound like a nervous system rather than a personality trait, which is why Chandler reads as anxious rather than smug. He could also do the opposite: The Ron Clark Story in 2006 and his 2003 work on The West Wing both brought Primetime Emmy nominations for straight dramatic acting, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip gave him a lead written in long, dense paragraphs that he handled without any of the comic armour.

The film career never found the same fit. Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes, Three to Tango, Serving Sara and 17 Again are mostly light romantic vehicles, with the exception of The Whole Nine Yards and its sequel, which at least used his talent for panic. Later television, Mr. Sunshine, Go On and The Odd Couple, kept putting him at the centre of shows that never found the audience the first one had. He published a memoir in 2022 and died in 2023.