‘Completely knocked her off her feet’
Jennifer Aniston’s friends are worried about her in the wake of Matthew Perry’s death, sources tell Page Six.
The “Friends” star has taken his passing at just 54 extremely badly, according to a well-placed industry source.
She and the other four surviving members of the cast of “Friends” mourned him at his funeral Friday.
“Out of the remaining five, Jen and Courteney [Cox] are reeling the most, and Jen is probably the one who is struggling most acutely,” said the source.
“It’s a second massive loss in less than a year, with the one-year anniversary of her dad’s death just around the corner. She still hasn’t fully regained her footing from that, and now this has just completely knocked her off her feet.”
Aniston’s father, John Aniston, starred on “Days of Our Lives,” and in announcing his death at age 89 in November 2022, the actress called him “one of the most beautiful humans I ever knew.”
“She is trying to regroup and recover but it’s been a completely devastating blow,” the source added.
The 54-year-old star joined remaining cast members Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc, at Perry’s funeral at Forest Lawn cemetery in LA on Friday — minutes away from the Warner Bros. studios where they filmed the NBC sitcom for a decade.
Aniston — who broke down in tears in a 2004 interview at the prospect of losing Perry — was seen walking behind the other cast members accompanied by a security guard.
However, while the cast — who released a touching tribute to their “brother” — joined the intimate service, they did not join family and close friends for his burial, where the Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush hit “Don’t Give Up” was played.
Perry drowned in the jacuzzi at his Pacific Palisades home at the end of last month. He was open about his struggles and addiction and had praised Aniston for checking in on him.
“She was the one that reached out the most. You know, I’m really grateful to her for that,” Perry said of Aniston in an October 2022 interview with Diane Sawyer.
Perry also revealed that it was Aniston who initially confronted him on the “Friends” set when his addiction became evident to his castmates.
He also disclosed his crush on Aniston after meeting her through mutual friends three years before they started work on their sitcom, detailing in his memoir how she gently let him down when he asked her out.
“She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’ “
Although he was still crushing on her when they started “Friends,” which first aired in September 1994, he said his feelings did eventually wear off, mainly because of Aniston’s “deafening lack of interest.”
But the pair instead grew an unbreakable bond, with Perry revealing that it was Aniston who “reached out the most” amid his years-long drug and alcohol addiction.
In August, Aniston, currently starring in “The Morning Show,” opened up about her father’s death to the Wall Street Journal as she said she believed he had sent her a sign at his funeral.
She revealed how she dropped a crystal that she’d kept for years into her father’s jacket before his burial. Afterward, she noticed that the crystal had apparently broken and she still had a piece of it on her vanity.
“I feel closer to him now than I did almost when he was alive,” she said. “I feel like he’s everywhere. I really do.”
Page Six has reached out to her rep for comment.
Source: Page Six
