It’s an eerie co-incidence.
The death of Friends star Matthew Perry came almost 30 years to the day since a tragic anniversary – the passing of his former co-star and friend River Phoenix.
The loss was deeply personal for Perry, who later wrote that his friend was “too beautiful for this world”.
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Phoenix – a rising Hollywood star in the early 1990s and older brother of future Oscar winner Joaquin – was only 23 when his life was cut short.
He overdosed on cocaine and heroin outside the Viper Room, a notorious club owned by Johnny Depp in West Hollywood.
His death came in the early hours of Halloween in 1993, sending shockwaves across the world.
Matthew Perry and River Phoenix starred alongside one another in the Friends actor’s first film role, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.
Phoenix was already a household name, having shot to fame in the coming-of-age film Stand By Me (1986) when he was just 14.
His brother Joaquin, then 19, was the one to make the 911 call that night, pleading: “He’s having seizures, get over here please, please, cause he’s dying, please.”
Perry, meanwhile, was in his apartment down the road.
In his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry recalled learning of the news of his friend’s death.
“River was a beautiful man inside and out – too beautiful for this world, it turned out,” Perry wrote.
“It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down.”
The Friends star said that he “heard the screaming” from his apartment in Los Angeles, which was located near the Viper Room, the night his friend died.
“Went back to bed; woke up to the news,” he wrote.
Perry, who was also in his early 20s at the time, said he sobbed when he heard River had died.
River Phoenix had gone to the Viper Room that night with his girlfriend, actor Samantha Mathis.
“I knew something was wrong that night, something I didn’t understand,” Mathis later recounted.
“I didn’t see anyone doing drugs but he was high in a way that made me feel uncomfortable – I was in way over my head.
“Forty-five minutes later, he was dead.”
Like Perry, Phoenix struggled with the trappings of fame.
In an interview after Phoenix’s death, his mother Arlyn told Esquire: “As River grew, he did become more and more uncomfortable being the poster boy for all good things.
”He often said he wished he could just be anonymous.
“But he never was. When he wasn’t a movie star, he was a missionary.
“There’s a beauty in that – the man with the cause, the leader – but there’s also a deep loneliness.”
In another section of Perry’s memoir, the Friends star recalled River Phoenix’s incredible acting talent.
“River was a better actor than me; I was funnier,” Perry wrote.
“But I certainly held my own in our scenes – no small feat, when I look back decades later.
“But more important, River just looked at the world in a different way than we all did, and that made him fascinating, and charismatic, and, yes, beautiful, but not in a Gap ad kinda way (though he was that, too) — in a there-is-no-one-else-in-the-world-like-him kind of way.”
It is perhaps poignant that Perry’s own death came just shy of the 30th anniversary of his good friend’s passing.
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