Jennifer Aniston ‘reeling’ following Matthew Perry’s death

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Jennifer Aniston’s friends have expressed concern for the actress following Matthew Perry’s death.

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“Out of the remaining five, Jen and Courteney (Cox) are reeling the most, and Jen is probably the one who is struggling most acutely,” a source tells Page Six.

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“It’s a second massive loss in less than a year, with the one-year anniversary of her dad’s death just around the corner. She still hasn’t fully regained her footing from that, and now this has just completely knocked her off her feet.”

The insider added, “She is trying to regroup and recover, but it’s been a completely devastating blow.”

Aniston, 54, paid her respects to Perry along with the rest of his Friends castmates and family at a private burial last Friday.

According to the Daily Mail, Aniston “kept to herself” during the observance.

An attendee at the service told the outlet there was “not a dry eye” by the time the funeral, which featured the Peter Gabriel-Kate Bush song Don’t Give Up, ended. “There were a lot of tears and laughter. Only close friends and family spoke.”

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According to TMZ, Perry’s private service was held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles near the Warner Bros. lot where he shot Friends for a decade. In addition to his Friends castmates, the funeral was attended by Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, his father, John Bennett Perry, his stepfather, Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison, and other family members.

Perry was found dead Saturday, Oct. 28, in an apparent drowning, just a few hours after finishing a two-hour game of pickleball.

According to an onlooker, Aniston was one of the first people to arrive at Perry’s funeral.

“Nobody shed more tears for Matthew during the darkest points of his struggles with addiction than Jennifer,” one close friend of the actress told the Daily Mail.

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In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote about his struggle with drug and alcohol addiction and his time playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom, which ran for a decade from 1994 to 2004.

He also opened up about his unrequited crush on Aniston, whom he met years before they starred together on Friends.

“I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her,” Perry shared in the book [per the New York Post]. “And I got the sense she was intrigued too — maybe it was going to be something.”

But she turned him down early on after he called her to tell her about how he landed two acting gigs.

“Bad idea — I could feel ice forming through the phone,” Perry wrote. “Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way … and I only compounded the error by then asking her out. She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’”

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When they got the job acting opposite one another on Friends, Perry recalled how he still had feelings for her.

“Fairly early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston,” he wrote. “Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, ‘How long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?’”

But eventually, he was able to say to himself: “‘All right, that’s enough.’”

“Fortunately, even though I was still attracted to her and thought she was so great, that first day we were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.”

Perry later revealed that it was Aniston who checked in on him the most to see how he was doing after the show ended and his addiction issues continued.

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“I’m really grateful for that,” he told Diane Sawyer in October 2022.

“The idea of ever losing him,” left Aniston in tears nearly two decades ago. Asked if there’s something that she would have wanted Perry to know, Aniston told Sawyer back in 2004 that her message would have been, “That he’s alright,” before becoming emotional.

“He struggled,” she said, referencing Perry’s addiction battle, “and we didn’t know. We weren’t equipped to deal with it. Nobody had ever dealt with that.”

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X: @markhdaniell

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