Julia Roberts has broken her silence on the death of her former flame Matthew Perry.
The Leave the World Behind star spoke to Entertainment Tonight in an exclusive interview published on Monday in which she described the loss as “heartbreaking.”
“The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking,” Julia said of Matthew, who died at the age of 52 in October.
“I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.”
The Pretty Woman star became romantically involved with Matthew after a memorable role she did in a post-Super Bowl episode of Friends in 1996.
Julia seemed to dodge a question about Matthew on The View last week, Deadline reported.
“As you know, Matthew Perry has recently passed,” co-host Sara Haines asked Julia on the show. “Do you have a favourite memory of your time with ‘Friends?’”
Julia decided to side-step the question by saying she is “football fanatic,” and appearing on the sitcom’s Super Bowl episode “made me feel that much closer to the Super Bowl, which I’ve never been to”.
It’s easy to understand why Julia has been careful in her remarks concerning Matthew’s death. The Emmy nominee, who wrote about his three-month relationship with Julia in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, was pretty open about dumping her due to his own fragile ego.
“I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me,” he wrote in the book. “Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable.
“So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”