Maeve Quinlan only knew the late Matthew Perry as “the cute guy by the elevator” in her Los Angeles building until he was on her TV screen.
“I yelled at my roommate, ‘That’s “Cute Guy By The Elevator”!’ And there on this new show were the castmates he was out with that night,” Quinlan, 59, told Soap Opera Digest in an interview published on Thursday, March 28. “I had the biggest crush on him, but I never saw him again because by the time the show was picked up, he had — like every actor does — moved to the Hollywood Hills.”
The Bold and the Beautiful alum and Perry crossed paths again in 2002 at a charity tennis event. “We got on like a house on fire,” she said. Quinlan became Perry’s first long-term girlfriend in the spotlight, dating from 2002 to 2003 before calling it quits.
“When Matthew and I embarked on a romantic relationship he was 100 percent sober and was very open about his previous struggles,” she said. “That was his one fully sober year, and we were practically inseparable. One of the reasons he liked being with me was that I didn’t do drugs.”
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After they split, Quinlan said they “morphed into eventually and seamlessly just being best friends, like brother and sister.” Even at “the height of his fame,” Quinlan said the Friends alum “was the exact same guy” that she met years prior.
“He was the guy every guy wanted to hang out with and every girl wanted to date. He was the guy next door,” she recalled. “He was kind of unsure of himself. He wasn’t, believe it or not, completely confident with girls, even though he dated the likes of Julia Roberts.”
While Quinlan and Perry were close, she admitted she “had no idea how much he was internally struggling because his main focus was always making other people happy and laughing.” She added, “He really thought the fame would make it all better but it didn’t.”
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Quinlan explained that Perry was “protective” of her because he knew that her ex-husband, the late Tom Sizemore, was an addict. (Sizemore died in March 2023 at the age of 61.) She “never” saw Perry “take a drink or abuse any substances” when they were together.
In recent years, Quinlan noted that Perry “would not even try and reach out.” After his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, hit shelves in 2022, Quinlan said a mutual friend told her to reach out — but she didn’t.
“I regret to this day that I did not call Matthew to tell him I was proud of him,” she said. “It took a lot of guts and bravery for him to write that book and be so brutally honest. I know him well enough to say he didn’t write that book for himself; he wrote that book to selflessly help others get sober by seeing his own difficult journey. I hope it helped others. I really do.”
In October 2023, Perry was found dead in his Los Angeles home at the age of 54. It was later revealed in an autopsy report that he died from “acute effects of ketamine.” When Quinlan heard the news, she said she was “devastated.”
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“It wasn’t a shock but I still couldn’t believe it happened. And although we hadn’t seen each other in a while, I miss him very much,” she said. “He was truly a close friend. When I drive by our old apartment building on Doheny, I think so fondly of our elevator meet-ups and the fate that building had in store for both of us, not just later for us personally, but because it’s the building we both lived in when we each got cast in the longest-running shows of both of our careers.”
She added that knowing him “sober was the greatest gift of all.”
“As the years went on, so many of us lost Matty little by little to his disease — and the important part of that sentence is that it is a disease,” she said, adding that “the best gift” to give Perry would be to remember him for his work and success in helping others get sober through his foundation, The Matthew Perry Foundation. “That’s how we celebrate the one and only Matty, who the world knew as Matthew Perry.”
