Three years after Matthew Perry’s death, his sister Mia Perry Bowick still talks to him from her porch in Colorado. She imagines him in the next chair, reassuring her when life gets difficult.
Bowick discussed their relationship with ABC News‘ Juju Chang in an interview published October 28. “So he was my person, I was his person,” she said.
Perry died on October 28, 2023, at 54. The Los Angeles County medical examiner determined that the acute effects of ketamine caused his death and classified it as accidental.
Bowick also appears in The One About Matthew Perry, the three-part documentary that began streaming on Netflix on October 27. Directed by Mary Robertson, it marks her first time discussing her brother on camera.
She Remembers Being Welcomed on the ‘Friends’ Set
As a child visiting her brother at work, Bowick would sit in the women’s dressing room and play with her hair. “They were so sweet,” she recalled of the cast, who welcomed her as Matthew’s little sister.
The show’s success also changed family outings. In the documentary, Bowick recalls being followed by photographers whenever she was with him, according to Page Six. She also describes a surprise Christmas gift when she was 15, as they left a restaurant, a valet pulled up in a red Ford Mustang convertible and asked for her. Perry explained that the car was hers.
Aniston Hugged Her Before the Cast Approached Perry’s Casket
At the November 2023 funeral, Bowick was caught off guard by the arrival of Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer. She told Chang she had been in a “fog of grief.”
In the documentary, she says she had not seen the actors in roughly two decades. Aniston embraced her first, and the others followed. All five then walked toward Perry’s casket holding hands and stood around him crying, according to PEOPLE‘s account of the series.
Bowick also recalled imagining her brother behind her shoulder, making an irreverent comment about the scene. She laughed through tears as he was being placed in the mausoleum, recognizing his humor even while feeling uncomfortable about laughing during the service.
Understanding His Addiction Changed How the Family Responded
Bowick became a licensed psychotherapist, partly out of a desire to understand her brother’s addiction. During an October 26 appearance on TODAY, she recalled how little nuance there had been in the information available to her when he began discussing his difficulties.
Her early understanding came largely from the D.A.R.E. program, which she remembered as presenting drug use in stark, black-and-white terms. She said she wished she had understood sooner that addiction was an illness. That perspective helped relatives avoid interpreting a person’s inability to stop using substances as something directed at them.
As the family learned more, she said, it became “easier to love him through it” rather than trying to control what was happening. Perry had described his own efforts to recover in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
Bowick Had Declined Earlier Invitations to Tell His Story
Bowick told Netflix that she had needed time before she felt ready to share those memories. She wanted audiences to know her brother beyond both Chandler Bing and his addiction, and described working with Robertson’s team as a way to understand her own grieving process.
The production combines previously unreleased family photographs and videos with interviews involving people who knew Perry before he became famous. Among them are longtime friends Roger Castillo and David Pressman. His five principal Friends costars appear in archival material but did not give new interviews for the project.
Bowick’s husband, music producer and sound designer David Bowick, also contributed. In a Facebook post quoted by Entertainment Weekly, he said he appeared briefly in the series and wrote music heard during the credits of its first two episodes. He described the work as a meaningful opportunity to help tell his brother-in-law’s story.
Asked on TODAY what she missed most about her brother, Bowick said, “I miss being able to hug him after our conversation.”