Gilmore Girls alum Lauren Graham said Matthew Perry gave her a pickleball set for her birthday in March 2023 ― at a time when the Friends star was re-entering her life.
“He’s like really into tennis and pickleball, with a card that said, ‘Be older,’” she said Friday at a Washington stop on her book tour, per Deadline.
Graham explained that while Perry “was not technically ever a boyfriend, he was an almost in my life.”
The Have I Told You This Already? author said Perry was a “friend and a constant.”
“We would stretch for a year, then he would come back in my life, and he had just come back in my life last year,” she said.
The Friends star died in October at age 54 primarily from the “acute effects” of ketamine after reportedly playing pickleball that morning, an autopsy concluded. He was found in his hot tub.
“He fell in love with the sport,” his pickleball trainer Matt Manasse told NBC News, “and he really wanted to use it for his recovery.”
Shortly after his death, Graham explained how the success of Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, about his skyrocketing fame amid struggles with drugs and alcohol, buoyed his spirits.
“This last year, he was so proud of the book he wrote, and of how many people it touched,” Graham said. “It was a success that gave him a level of happiness that I hadn’t seen in him for a really long time, so that’s a nice memory.”
Graham starred with Perry in the 2008 movie Birds of America and later had a guest role on Perry’s reboot of The Odd Couple.
“No one made me laugh as hard,” she told CBS Mornings. “I mean, just tears streaming.”
