The two prayers of Friends star Matthew Perry

On 28 October, the much-loved Friends star Matthew Perry died at his home in Los Angeles, aged 54.

In his autobiography Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing published just last year, Perry recalled how the first prayer he ever prayed was: ‘Please God make me famous, you can do anything you want to me, just make me famous.’ Just three weeks later he landed the life-changing part in the sitcom Friends, playing Chandler Bing.

Later in his life, he reflected that he believed this ‘very dumb prayer’ had been answered so he would understand how unfulfilling fame is. He said: ‘I had the American dream – the house, the job, the fame. And I loved it, for about six months. But then I walked into my house one day and thought “Ah man, this is not fixing this problem that I have”.’

Thankfully, that was not the only prayer Matthew prayed in his life. Amid a brutal fight with addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs, going into rehab 15 times and spending an estimated $7 million trying to get sober, he prayed what he described as a ‘much more real prayer’.

On his knees in his kitchen, he said: ‘God, please help me, show me that you are here.’

This prayer led to a felt experience ‘in the presence of God’ that he later credited as the reason he stayed sober for the next two years of his life. Crying, he saw a light get bigger around him and slowly fill the whole room.

‘For the first time in my life I felt okay, I felt safe, taken care of,’ he shared in his autobiography. ‘Decades of struggling with God, and wrestling with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion … I had been in the presence of God, I was certain of it. And this time I had prayed for the right thing: help.’

Matthew became an advocate for rehabilitation and in 2013 received the Champion of Recovery Award from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The LA Times reported that no drugs were found at the scene of his death.