Matthew Perry: A Look Back at Our First Visit to the ‘Friends’ Set In 1994

“Extra” was with Matthew Perry and the cast of “Friends” from the very beginning. We look back at our first visit to the set in 1994, when we spoke with Matthew sitting on that iconic couch on their Central Perk set after the pilot was picked up.

Perry worked alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc, and he told us at the time, “They've cast the show so well that everybody's really, kind of in a frightening way, like their character.”

Matthew explained, “We play poker, you know, just for fake money, but we play poker in this back room and we play sounding exactly like our characters, which is proof, I guess, they cast the show well.”

In the early days of “Friends,” Perry was looking forward to see what the future held for his character, Chandler Bing.

“In the pilot, nothing really happened to him,” Matthew said, “He didn't have a storyline, but he managed to be funny and he had a certain presence to him… so you wonder what would this guy be like if something actually happened to him, so now that the show got picked up, we'll start finding out.”

He shared, “I find it really rare that you can kind of shake hands with a character in the morning and really feel good about what you're doing, and that's what I feel here.”

It was clear he felt they had captured lightning in a bottle.

Perry told us, “It's an intelligent show, and the fear is after you do the first one you're going to slide into some normal sitcomy show, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen on this show.”

TMZ broke the story that Perry was found dead at 54 in his hot tub at his L.A.-area home on Saturday. His official cause of death, however, will likely be delayed for weeks.

To hear more of Matthew's past interviews with "Extra," you can download this week’s “Extra: The Podcast” on the Audacy app and everywhere podcasts are available. New episodes will be released weekly on Wednesdays.