Celebrity
Matthew Perry’s Final Birthday Gift To Lauren Graham Was Very Sweet
The Gilmore Girls star reflected on their longtime friendship.
At a book tour stop in Washington D.C. for her new book, Have I Told You This Already?, Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham reflected on her longtime friendship with Friends’ Matthew Perry, revealing the birthday gift that he gave her before his death in October 2023 .
Graham said that Perry gave her a pickleball set: “He’s like really into tennis and pickleball,” she explained, per Deadline. The accompanying card read, “be older.”
She went on to speak about her friendship with Perry. “While he was not technically ever a boyfriend, he was an almost in my life,” she said. “We would stretch for a year, then he would come back in my life, and he had just come back in my life last year.”
It seems that Graham hass had time to process Perry’s loss since she first addressed his death, in a November 2023 interview with CBS Mornings. “I am still in shock,” she said, adding, “No one made me laugh as hard. I mean, just tears, streaming. There was just such joy in being around him and being his friend.”
During her book tour event, the Gilmore Girls star also discussed about Perry’s 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. “At the time I saw him was he was so thrilled with how his book was received,” she said. “And not just because it was a huge success, but because his life’s work kind of became, ‘How can I give back? How can I talk about the struggles I had and hopefully help someone else?’”
Perry mentioned Graham in the book — and included a photo captioned, “Me and the beautiful Lauren Graham.”
For her part, Graham wrote about Perry in her 2016 book Talking as Fast as I Can, shutting down rumors that they’d dated. Instead, she said that after they’d met at an industry event, “He became my longtime Friend Who I Almost But Never Exactly Dated, or FWIABNED.”
Ironically, they went on to play a couple onscreen twice, first as husband and wife in the 2008 film Birds in America, then on an episode of Perry’s 2015 sitcom The Odd Couple, in which Graham played Perry’s ex-wife.
