Brian Austin Green is reflecting on the difficulty of losing his Beverly Hills, 90210 costar Luke Perry so suddenly.
“There was a part of me that couldn’t really process that that was real,” Green, 50, said in a Wednesday, January 31, clip of an upcoming episode of Getting Grilled With Curtis Stone. “I texted him the day after he passed. Just because there was a part of me that was like, ‘No, he’s gonna answer back. He’s hiding somewhere. Or something’s happened.’”
Green, who starred alongside Perry on 90210 from 1990 to 2000, noted that while he didn’t “completely believe” he’d hear back from his friend “a big part” of him was hoping “that was the case.”
Perry suffered from a massive stroke in February 2019 while at his home in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was rushed to a nearby hospital via ambulance, where he remained until his death on March 4. He was 52 years old.
While Green admitted that he’s begun to accept the idea of death with age, he never thought he’d lose someone so early — especially Perry. “I honestly never expected that it would be Luke,” he said. “To me, in my mind, Luke was the strongest of everyone. He was the constant guy, he was exactly who he was at all times.”
Despite the loss, Green clarified that Perry is still a “big part” of his life and the relationship he had with the actor is something he thinks about “almost on a daily basis.”
“When things happen in my life,” he said, “I’ll stop for a second and I’ll think about him and what I learned from him and what I think his opinion would be of what it is I do.”
Green cited the personal “connections” Perry had with the people around him as the “legacy” he left as opposed to his professional accolades. “It’s the lasting imprint that you left on your friends, on your family, on your children,” he explained. “It’s the stories that people share about you afterward that to me.”
It was after Perry’s death, Green noted, that he began to hear stories about his friend’s benevolence as Perry was known to be a private person.
“He did a lot of things and didn’t ever talk about them. He would buy a new wheelchair for the guy on the block who needed one, or get on a plane and fly to a hospital where a girl was sick,” he shared, citing a few altruistic examples throughout Perry’s life. “Whenever he flew on a plane, he would have a pocket full of balloons so when he heard a baby crying, he could walk back to where they were, blow up a balloon and give them something that would take their mind off of it a little bit. And he never shared that with anybody.”
He added, “As shocked as I was to hear those, I was like, that’s absolutely Luke. It didn’t surprise me.”
Green and Perry, who portrayed David Silver and Dylan McKay, respectively, on the teen soap, starred alongside Shannen Doherty (Brenda Walsh), Jennie Garth (Kelly Taylor), Jason Priestley (Brandon Walsh), Ian Ziering (Steve Sanders), Tori Spelling (Donna Martin) and Gabrielle Carteris (Andrea Zuckerman). Days after Perry’s death was confirmed, the costars gathered at Carteris’ home to mourn the loss of their longtime pal.
“People I haven’t seen in, like, 18 years, at least,” Green shared during a March 2019 episode of his 90210 rewatch podcast when discussing who showed up to honor the late star. “And you see them there, and it’s … you were happy to see everybody, and you felt like, ‘God, it’s been too long,’ and it was great, but what a horrible reason to have to see everybody again.”
