The two briefly dated around the time she made a cameo in a 1996 Friends episode

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Julia Roberts is remembering the brief time she spent with Matthew Perry, who unexpectedly died in October at 54 years old.

Roberts made a guest appearance in the 1996 Friends episode, “The One After the Super Bowl.” She played Susie Moss, a long-lost childhood friend of Perry’s character, Chandler Bing, who ends up pursuing a romantic relationship with her. Perry later revealed in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, that he and Roberts dated for three months during the time the episode was filmed.

When asked how her experience was on the sitcom, Roberts told Entertainment Tonight that it was “all good thoughts and feelings.” She added, “They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character, and it was a really fun time.”

As for Perry’s passing, she said, “The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking. I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.”

Matthew Perry and Julia Roberts on the set of Friends. GETTY IMAGES//GETTY IMAGES

Perry previously reflected on his brief romance with Roberts, writing in his memoir that he pushed for her to accept a guest role on Friends. “I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read: ‘The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,’” he wrote.

Their courtship began through a fax correspondence. “Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive,” Perry continued.

“I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived.”

The two eventually split, with Perry placing much of the blame on his own insecurities.

“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable,” he recalled in the memoir.

“Instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”