‘The One About Matthew Perry’ Director on Gaining His Sister’s Trust, Explaining How He Died and More

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains conversation about all three episodes of “The One About Matthew Perry,” now streaming on Netflix.

At the end of Netflix’s new docuseries “The One About Matthew Perry,” director Mary Robertson can be heard saying something off camera. “He feels very present,” Robertson softly offers to the actor’s sister Mia Perry Bowick, whose interviews serve as the centerpiece of the reflective three-episode look at the “Friends” star’s life,which was dominated by his battle with addiction.

Robertson is the first to say she doesn’t believe in things she can’t see. But having spent months with the memories of Perry told through his loved ones, she admitted to one of the people who knew him best that he was more than just stories to her after this process.

“I’m not someone who traffics in theories about the paranormal, and I don’t think I believe in UFOs, although feel free to prove me wrong,” Robertson tells Variety. “But I did feel Matthew, and I mean that in multiple senses. I felt Matthew when I was interviewing Mia, especially when we were speaking about how he would want the film to end. Her sense of Matthew is so sharp and so intimate and so present tense, and she did such an incredible job of bringing us close to her experience with him through her words and her emotion and her honesty. Not only with her voice, but through the photographs and the videos that she has. One develops a sense of Matthew’s presence, and I believe that he was present for me at the very end.”

Bowick has never spoken openly about her brother’s decadeslong struggle with addiction, but now shares 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 charts Perry’s meteoric rise from being a working actor to a global comedic star, thanks to “Friends” and his character Chandler Bing, and what ultimately becomes the biggest role of his life –– an advocate for addiction rehabilitation while continuously suffering from the disease himself.

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

Robertson commends Bowick’s candor across her two interviews, the first of which spanned two days of filming. “There were no boundaries, there were no barriers for her,” she says. At the start of the project, though, Bowick had expressed her anxiety to Robertson. “I remember when we turned on the Zoom cameras for the first meeting, Mia and her husband David looked at each other, and they inhaled and exhaled, and said, ‘We’re nervous,’” Robertson remembers. “Then I inhaled and exhaled, and I said, ‘We’re nervous too.” That was the beginning of a really beautiful connection.”

But the series almost didn’t happen. After the release of Perry’s 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” Robertson and her Maxine Productions team reached out to his publisher and several people within his inner circle about making a documentary. They never heard back. It wasn’t until Perry’s tragic passing in 2023, from the acute effects of ketamine, that she renewed her efforts and ultimately got traction among those close to him.

Bowick was not the first to sign on, but ultimately became the lynchpin for Robertson to feel it could be a substantial project. Also important were the voices of Perry’s closest friends, Roger Castillo and David Pressman. Robertson says Castillo signed on first, after many calls and conversations, and they flew him out to Los Angeles for the interview. Only after that did she get to plead her case to Pressman.

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

Robertson confirms the team did reach out to Perry’s “Friends” co-stars to participate, but “they chose not to,” she says. Still, they are present throughout the series, in archival behind-the-scenes footage and press interviews. But fans of the series will hear Bowick’s account of Perry’s being taken directly from rehab to set to film Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler’s wedding in Season 7; and a particularly poignant memory of his funeral, when the “Friends” cast arrived together holding hands, and stood together crying at his open casket to say goodbye.

The documentary also features Warren Littlefield, the former entertainment president of NBC, who talks about casting Perry as Chandler and navigating, from the network’s perspective, his repeated visits to rehab while the series was filming.

Much of Perry’s story has already been chronicled by the actor himself in his memoir. Robertson read it one sitting, and was floored by his willingness to share the depths of his addictions. “I remember the blue couch that I was sitting on, and the trees that I saw at the window as I read it,” she says. “I remember that he begins his book by saying, in essence, he should be dead. I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I was done.”

Despite how important it was to her origins with the project, she doesn’t include anything from the memoir in the documentary, except for that opening page, which reads, “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.”

When asked why she didn’t at least try to use Perry’s darkly funny audiobook narration to give more space for his voice, she explains that the documentary is about the perspective the book can’t offer. “We wanted to craft a text that enriched what Matthew delivered through the memoir,” she says. “His memoir delivers something that, by definition, is first person, and doesn’t include the accounts of those who can describe what it was like to love someone who is completely brilliant and generous and loving, but also grappling with this enormous monster that he carried on his shoulder for most of his life. This is their account that’s missing from the memoir.”

Perry does speak for himself though, through a grainy-quality but insightful interview he did with actor and friend Kevin Pollack in 2009 for the YouTube series, “Kevin Pollack’s Chat Show.” The raw footage of the interview, which Pollack granted to Robertson, winds through the documentary, giving Perry the chance to narrate his own story up to that point, which was just five years after “Friends” ended.

The Pollack interview is different from the others that appear in the doc, including stops on the late-night circuit. It’s more casual, jovial and reflective of a life, a career and how the latter had taken over the former. Robertson says getting access to the raw, long-form footage was another moment when the potential for the documentary became clear.

“There’s something really distinct about the quality of that interview, in that it is between two friends,” she says. “It’s not a talk show host who’s been prepped for the interview, and everyone knows exactly what they’re going to cover. They knew each other well, and they loved to make each other laugh too. Making each other laugh was their sport, so it was really transformational for our project to be able to use it.”

But inevitably, the docuseries has to shift from looking back on Perry’s life to exploring his death, which is not uncharted territory for Robertson. In recent years, she has explored the intersection of celebrity, mental health and criminality with series like “Framing Britney Spears” for FX and “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” for Investigation Discovery. The former sparked a significant conversation about the nature of conservatorships and had a hand in freeing Spears from her own controversial one. The latter was an Emmy-nominated hit that let former Disney Channel and Nickelodeon child stars share their stories of abuse behind the scenes. While Robertson insists that “The One About Matthew Perry” is not an investigative piece, those two series certainly helped guide her focus here on excavating the perils of celebrity.

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

But for a subject like Perry, who so many people think they know intimately, there is still confusion surrounding his death, which ultimately led to the conviction of five people involved with supplying him the cumulatively lethal doses of ketamine.

“As much as his final days and hours were heavily covered, there’s still some misunderstanding and mystery around what happened,” Robertson says, acknowledging the early conflicting reports of how he died and that people were indicted for their part in it. “Truth and accuracy are always our North Stars, so on some basic level, the assignment here was to render his last hours and the subsequent investigation, indictments, and sentencing with accuracy.”

The series leans on law enforcement to help explain the details, simply because those closest to Matthew were excluded from the side of his life driven by addiction.

“Certainly some of the people that we interviewed knew Kenny, Matthew’s assistant, who was ultimately indicted, but they were not in the house the night that Matthew passed away,” Robertson says. “They were not in the midst of these transactions, which were ultimately understood to be criminal.”

“The One About Matthew Perry” is the mode in which Robertson wants to operate moving forward, promising more investigative portraits in the vein of “Quiet on Set” as well. She also continues to explore with Maxine Productions the branches of power and criminality, particularly with the new financial crimes-focused series, “The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers” for Peacock and “The Real Wolf of Wall Street” for Paramount+.

Citing the smash-hit documentary “You Can See Everything,” Robertson says she’s excited “The One About Matthew Perry” is arriving at a time when people are actively seeking out boundary-breaking additions to the genre. While Perry’s story is told traditionally as it moves through his life, she hopes there is room to evolve the genre with renewed interest, thanks to subjects that are beloved, polarizing or a bit of both.

“We’re entering a really interesting era of documentary filmmaking, and documentary that is roughly biographical in nature — and part of that is projects like the Elizabeth Holmes film,” Robertson says. “We’re always in dialogue with the projects that have come before us, and I think we’re at a moment of evolution in the genre, where maybe we get to be more expansive now with our understanding of what that can be.”