The untimely passing of beloved actor Matthew Perry this past weekend, at age 54, merits a moment of reflection, for the outpouring of tributes and the abundance of affection for him seen since in every form of media.

Perry’s star turn and decade playing the sarcastic Chandler Bing on NBC’s iconic Friends (2004-2014) is certainly why he remains so universally adored. The series gained upwards of 20 million viewers each season during its primetime run, and continues to win legions of new fans every year in syndication. As writer Angel Shaw observes, new generations continue to fall in love with Friends, which broke the family sitcom mold in portraying six close friends becoming adults together in New York City.

While each character in the Friends ensemble is arguably indispensable—particularly as the actors, a tight-knit group, famously rallied the studio for equal salaries and standing as a cast—it’s Perry’s witty, layered portrayal of Chandler Bing that came to anchor the show.

Chandler’s wry humour—with Perry’s unique, emphatic delivery of slicing one-liners—is made endearing by the deep awkwardness and vulnerability of his character, as a geeky, metrosexual, commitment-phobe with a lucrative job in data, which he dislikes and nobody understands. As a child of divorce, with an erotic romance novelist mother and a Las Vegas drag queen father, Chandler is inherently self-doubting, yet it’s his stability which supports Joey’s floundering acting career and gives Phoebe temp work, and which eventually offers Monica the wedding and home of her dreams. In marrying his best friend and becoming a suburban father to surrogate twins, Chandler’s evolution is the strongest and most foundational character arc of the Friends series.

In clear hindsight, the hilarious complexity of Chandler Bing is inseparable from who Perry was in real life. Perry openly struggled from the age of 14 with drug and alcohol addiction, which he details candidly in his 2022 autobiography, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir. There are seasons of the show Perry didn’t remember filming. In this way, it’s impossible not to see Chandler’s robust energy and insecurity, his sharpness and poignancy, as a function of Perry’s own combination of these very human traits—the talents and the flaws, the struggles and the self-awareness, all bound up in Perry’s person.

On Perry’s Instagram, the comments on his posts are overwhelmingly from fans thanking him for what he gave them: laughter and smiles through Chandler’s humour, and openness and honesty in disclosing the vices and challenges of his real life. In these ways, fans were comforted by their sense of Perry’s companionship and solidarity, often in difficult times in their own lives. One fan writes, touchingly, ‘You were a great friend during my depressions. Thank you for Chandler Bing.’ Another writes, with an affectionate reference to a lauded episode: ‘You’re the one who made me laugh even when I was sad. You’ll be forever remembered, dear Chanandler Bong.’ Hilary Busis, writing for Vanity Fair about her sister’s struggles with addiction, chose the headline: ‘Matthew Perry Wanted to Be Remembered for Helping People. Reading His Book Helped Me.’

This generous legacy is the great and lasting gift that Matthew Perry gave to the world. He was a human actor—complex and compassionate—and in that way, a forever kind of friend.