Matthew Perry Documentary Director About His Sister Mia’s Death

SPOILER ALERT: This post includes conversations about all three episodes of “The One About Matthew Perry” currently streaming on Netflix.

At the end of Netflix’s new documentary series “The One About Matthew Perry,” director Mary Robertson can be heard saying something behind the camera. “He feels very present,” Robertson says softly to the actor’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, whose interviews form the centerpiece of a thoughtful three-part look at the “Friends” star’s life dominated by his battle with addiction.

Robertson was the first to say he didn’t believe in things he couldn’t see. But after spending months with the memories Perry told through his loved ones, he admitted to one of those who knew him best that Perry was more than just a story to him.

“I’m not one to theorize about the paranormal and I don’t think I believe in UFOs, but feel free to prove me wrong,” says Robertson. Diversity. “But I felt Matthew, and I mean that in many ways. I felt Matthew when I was interviewing Mia, especially when she was talking about how she wanted the movie to end. Her perception of Matthew is so sharp, so intimate and present, and she did an incredible job of bringing us closer to her experience with him through her words, her emotions, her honesty. Not just through her voice, but through the photos and videos she had. One develops a sense of Matthew’s presence, and I believe he was there for me in the end.”

Bowick has never spoken openly about her brother’s decades-long struggle with addiction, but now she’s sharing the full scope of Perry’s life from inside the family, including their relationship as half-siblings who share the same father, actor John Bennett Perry. The series chronicles Perry’s meteoric rise from working actor to global comedy star thanks to “Friends” and his character Chandler Bing, and ultimately what became the biggest role of his life, becoming an advocate for addiction rehab while he suffered from constant illness.

It also gives new details about special moments, including repeated visits to see him in rehab and being at his bedside after his near-fatal colon rupture in 2018. “That’s it, he’s not waking up,” Bowick says in Episode 3, recalling his reaction when he first arrived at the hospital.

Robertson praises Bowick’s candor in two interviews, the first of which spanned two days of shooting. “There were no boundaries for him, no barriers,” he says. However, at the beginning of the project, Bowick had expressed his concern to Robertson. “When we turned on the Zoom cameras for the first meeting, I remember Mia and her husband David looking at each other, breathing in and out, and saying, ‘We’re nervous,’” Robertson recalls. “Then I took a breath and said, ‘We’re nervous too.'” “That was the beginning of a really beautiful connection.”

But the series almost didn’t happen. Following the release of Perry’s 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Scary Thing,” Robertson and the Maxine Productions team reached out to her publicist and several members of her inner circle about making a documentary. They never responded. It wasn’t until Perry’s tragic death in 2023 from the acute effects of ketamine that he renewed his efforts, eventually gaining traction among those close to him.

Bowick wasn’t the first to sign on, but he ultimately became the cornerstone of why Robertson felt this could be a major project. Also important were the voices of Perry’s closest friends, Roger Castillo and David Pressman. After many calls and conversations, Castillo signed on first and they flew him to Los Angeles for an interview, Robertson said. Only then was he able to present his case to Pressman.

“We all had dinner with David after Roger’s interview, and Roger sat there with David and said, ‘It went really well,'” says Robertson. “I understand that Matthew’s life had been cut out for content by the tabloids over many years, and that his friends and loved ones were fiercely protective of Matthew. This was their educated response, and a completely understandable response. They had never met me before, so through time and experience we had to come to a place where they believed my intentions were correct to them.”

Robertson confirms that the team approached Perry’s “Friends” co-stars about joining them, but “they chose not to.” They are nevertheless present throughout the series in archival behind-the-scenes footage and press interviews. But fans of the series will hear that Bowick had Perry picked up straight from rehab and taken to the set for the filming of Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler’s wedding in Season 7; and a particularly poignant memory of his funeral, where the “Friends” cast gathered together, holding hands, and stood together at his open casket to say goodbye, weeping.

The documentary also features former NBC entertainment president Warren Littlefield; He talks about Perry taking on the role of Chandler and how the network handled his repeated visits to rehab while filming the series.

Much of Perry’s story has already been told by the actor himself in his memoirs. Robertson read the book in one sitting and was struck by his willingness to share the depths of his addictions. “I remember the blue sofa I was sitting on and the trees I saw in the window while reading the book,” he says. “I remember he started his book by saying that he was actually supposed to be dead. When I finished it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Despite how important it is to the origins of the project, the documentary does not include any of the memoirs other than the opening page, which reads, “Hello, my name is Matthew, you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I must be dead.”

When asked why he didn’t at least try to use Perry’s dark and funny audiobook narration to make more room for Perry’s voice, he explains that the documentary is about the perspective the book can’t offer. “We wanted to create a text that would enrich what Matthew conveyed through his memoir,” he says. “Her memoirs, by definition, are a first-person account and do not include the accounts of those who can not only describe what it is like to love someone who is completely intelligent, generous, and loving, but also grapple with this huge beast that she has carried on her shoulder for most of her life. That is the narrative that is missing from their memoirs.”

But Perry speaks for himself, thanks to a grainy but illuminating interview he conducted with actor and friend Kevin Pollack in 2009 for his YouTube series “Kevin Pollack’s Chat Show.” Raw footage of Pollack’s interview with Robertson weaves throughout the documentary, giving Perry a chance to tell her own story up to that point, which happened just five years after the end of “Friends.”

The Pollack interview differs from others that appear in the doc, including stops on the midnight circuit. It’s more casual, lighthearted, and reflects a life, a career, and how the latter takes over the former. Robertson says accessing the raw, long-format footage was another moment when the documentary’s potential became clear.

“There’s something really different about the quality of this interview; it’s between two friends,” he says. “He’s not a talk show host prepared for an interview, and everyone knows exactly what they’re going to cover. They knew each other well, and they loved making each other laugh. Making each other laugh was their sport, so being able to use that for our project was a truly transformational experience.”

But inevitably the docuseries is forced to shift from looking back at Perry’s life to exploring his death, which was not uncharted territory for Robertson. In recent years, she has explored the intersection of fame, mental health and criminality with series such as “Framing Britney Spears” for FX and “The Silent Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” for Investigation Discovery. The former sparked an important conversation about the nature of conservatorships and helped save Spears from her own controversy. The latter became an Emmy-nominated hit that allowed former Disney Channel and Nickelodeon child stars to share their behind-the-scenes stories of abuse. While Robertson insists “The One About Matthew Perry” is not an investigative piece, those two series certainly helped him focus here on exposing the perils of fame.

“Celebrities are, in many ways, reflections of our ideals,” he says. “They are mirrors we hold up to ourselves. They show us who and what we want to be, who and what we are allowed to be. I believe popular culture is equivalent to the air we breathe. It fills our lungs and bodies and shapes our health.”

But for a subject like Perry, whom many people thought he knew intimately, there is still confusion surrounding his death, which ultimately led to the conviction of five people who supplied him with a cumulatively lethal dose of ketamine.

“Although his final days and hours have been heavily covered, there are still some misunderstandings and mysteries about what happened,” Robertson says, acknowledging initial conflicting reports about how he died and people being blamed for their roles in it. “Truth and accuracy are always our North Stars, so at a fundamental level the mission here was to accurately present his final hours and the subsequent investigation, indictments and sentences.”

The series relies on law enforcement to help uncover the details as those closest to Matthew are excluded from the part of his life driven by addiction.

“Some of the people we interviewed certainly knew Matthew’s assistant, Kenny, who was ultimately charged, but they were not home the night Matthew passed away,” Robertson says. “They were not in the middle of what turned out to be criminal transactions.”

“The One About Matthew Perry” is the mode Robertson wants to move into, and it also promises more investigative portraits in the vein of “Silence on the Set.” She also continues to explore the branches of power and guilt with Maxine Productions; especially with new series focused on financial crimes called “The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers” for Peacock and “The Real Wolf of Wall Street” for Paramount+.

Citing the breakout documentary “You Can See Everything,” Robertson says he’s excited that “The One About Matthew Perry” arrives at a time when people are actively looking for boundary-breaking additions to the genre. While Perry’s story has been traditionally told as she progresses through her life, she hopes there’s room for the genre to thrive with renewed interest, through subjects that are beloved, polarizing, or a little bit of both.

“We’re entering a really interesting era in documentary filmmaking, and documentaries that are loosely biographical in nature, part of that being projects like the Elizabeth Holmes movie,” Robertson says. “We’re always in dialogue with the projects that come our way, and I think we’re in a phase of evolution where maybe now we can be more broad-based with our understanding of what this could be.”