Hank Azaria’s Heartbreaking Tribute to Matthew Perry, Who Helped Him Get Sober

Hank Azaria is remembering his friend Matthew Perry in a heartbreaking video on social media.

He shared on Twitter, “Matthew was the first friend I made in Los Angeles. When I moved there I was 21, he was 16. We did a pilot together… that never saw the light of day.”

Azaria went on, “Matthew and I became really good friends and we were really more like brothers for a long time. We drank a lot together, we laughed a lot together, we were there for each other in the early days of our career. As funny as he was on ‘Friends’… in person he was just the funniest man ever.”

“He just lived to laugh and every night, he was like a genius, he would start to weave comedy threads together, just hanging out, a joke here, a joke there… and then by the end of the night he would weave them altogether in a crescendo of hilarity. Most nights spent with Matthew you were crying laughing by the end.”

Hank went on, “I really loved him, a lot of close to him felt like we lost him to drugs and alcohol a long time ago, because as he documented in his autobiography there was so much suffering. I had to pick up and put down that biography like 11 times, it was so painful for me to read. As his friend who loved him, I knew he must be suffering but the details of it were just devastating.”

Azaria recalled how Matthew had helped with his own recovery journey, saying, “From a recovery perspective — I’ve been a sober guy for 17 years – I want to say the night I went into AA, Matthew brought me in. The whole first year I was sober, we went to meetings together… As a sober person, he was so caring and giving and wise, and he totally helped me get sober. I really wish he could have found it in himself to stay with the sober life more consistently.”

“But it is heartbreaking for those of us who loved him and knew him really well personally, we just missed him… That is one of the terrible things about this disease is that it takes away the person you love.”

He ended by writing, “Professionally, as an actor, he was so brilliant, I just wish that I and the world could have gotten what the rest of his career would have been.”

Hank was among the many stars who remembered Perry on social media. Read tributes from Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Shannen Doherty and others here.

TMZ broke the story, Perry was found dead at 54 in his hot tub at his L.A.-area home on Saturday. His official cause of death, however, will likely be delayed for weeks.