Friends Star Matthew Perry Truly Hated One Chandler Bing Feature
The sudden death of "Friends" star Matthew Perry at age 54 has longtime fans of the classic NBC sitcom feeling a host of complicated emotions, from shock to grief. For many, the distant process of mourning someone they didn't know personally — yet felt so close to, as they welcomed him into their homes each week via their TV screens — will take place in the form of revisiting the series. And as we all rewatch our favorite Matthew Perry moments on "Friends," it could be interesting to take note of how his performance as the wisecracking Chandler Bing takes a subtle shift starting in Season 6.
As he recounts in his 2022 memoir "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing," Perry actively fought to change the recognizably idiosyncratic vocal Chandlerisms that had begun to make him feel trapped while delivering lines. "That particular cadence — could it be more annoying? — had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I'd explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in season six and then beyond."
Chandler's unique cadence dated back to Matthew Perry's childhood
Though it eventually became a core part of his performance as Chandler Bing, Matthew Perry is able to trace back this speaking style's origins decades before "Friends" was even an idea. He describes in his memoir that this off-beat way of speaking helped him make other kids laugh while growing up in Canada. "I was back in Ottawa with my childhood friends the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had," he wrote. After employing it on "Friends" to a much larger effect, he would eventually dub this "unexpected" delivery method "Chandlerspeak."
"I was talking in a way that no one had talked in sitcoms before," he wrote, "hitting odd emphases, picking a word in a sentence you might not imagine was the beat." Later, he revealed that writers started implementing this into the scripts by underlining the less common words in a sentence of dialogue, out of curiosity for how Perry would handle it. Clearly, he pulled off the task with aplomb — and even if Perry himself grew to hate this aspect of his performance, its major impact on pop culture cannot be understated.
In the years since, Chandlerspeak became somewhat of a quiet phenomenon, at least in Perry's eyes, slowly rooting outward from a small seed he didn't realize he'd planted. "I didn't know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades. For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance."