Matthew Perry apologized to Keanu Reeves after quotes from his forthcoming biography that made fun of the star went viral. Excerpts from “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” the upcoming memoir by actor Tyler Perry about his life and battle with addiction, were released on Wednesday by Variety and The New York Post. In the sections, Perry talks about his friendship with the late River Phoenix, whom he collaborated with on the 1988 movie “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon,” as well as his feelings following Phoenix’s overdose death in 1993.
In the book, Perry stated that River was “a gorgeous man, inside and out – too beautiful for this world, it turned out.” “The men that fall tend to invariably be the genuinely gifted ones. Why does Keanu Reeves still live among us when creative minds like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger pass away? I was funny; River was a better actor. But even so, I managed to hold my own in our sequences, which is no minor accomplishment in retrospect.
In a later paragraph, Perry makes another allusion to Reeves when he describes how he felt upon hearing that Chris Farley, with whom he co-wrote the movie “Almost Heroes,” had also passed away in 1997 from an overdose: “His sickness had advanced quicker than mine had. Additionally, we did not share my healthy fear of the word “heroin,” Perry adds. “I dug a hole in the wall of Jennifer Aniston’s dressing room as soon as I realized this. We can see Keanu Reeves among us. Two weeks after his passing, I had to advertise “Almost Heroes,” which required me to talk about his drug and alcohol-related death in public. I was intoxicated the whole time.
In an interview with People Magazine, Perry admitted, “I’m a huge admirer of Keanu. “I made a mistake; I just picked a random name. I’m sorry. Instead, I ought to have used my name. Given that Reeves and Phoenix, who acted together in the 1991 film “My Own Private Idaho,” were close friends, many people on social media found Perry’s comments offensive. On Twitter, actors including Rahul Kohli, Lynda Carter, and Rachel Zegler expressed their support for Reeves.
In other parts of his biography, Perry discussed his battles with addiction in great detail, including a near-fatal opioid overdose in 2018 and a medical issue that caused him to withdraw from Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up.”