Lauren Graham has revealed her longtime friend Matthew Perry‘s last birthday message to her before his death months later.
The Gilmore Girls actress, 54, who first met Perry on a 2008 film set, recalled the Friends star hilariously told her to “‘Be older” in his birthday card for her in March 2023.
“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 at a Q&A event in Washington for her Have I Told You This Already? book tour.
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Graham recalled Perry gifted her a pickleball set for her 53rd birthday last year.
“He’s like really into tennis and pickleball, with a card that said, ‘Be older,'” she shared with the crowd, as per Deadline.
Perry died at his Los Angeles home on October 28 due to a “the acute affects of ketamine”, per the official autopsy report. He was 54.
The actor had been friends with Graham for around 15 years after first meeting on the set of Birds of America in 2008.
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Matthew Perry’s life and career in pictures
The pair shared the screen several times again over the years, with Graham making a guest appearance on Perry’s sitcom The Odd Couple in 2015.
Before that, the Parenthood star joined her friend for an episode on Go On in 2012.
In Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which came out in 2022, the actor included a photo with Graham.
“Me and the beautiful Lauren Graham,” he captioned the pic of the pair.
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Graham told the crowd at Lincoln Theater on Friday, seven months after the Friends star’s death last October, that it is “still really hard to believe”.
While the pair were speculated over the years to have dated, Graham reiterated they were never officially together but “he was an almost in my life.”
A month after Perry’s death, Graham reflected on her over a decade long friendship with the star during an interview with CBS Mornings.
“No one made me laugh as hard. I mean, just tears, streaming. There was just such joy in being around him and being his friend,” she told the outlet.
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