The “Bold and the Beautiful” star Maeve Quinlan only has nice memories of her relationship with the late Matthew Perry.
The actress, 59, opened up about the “Friends” star — who died in October 2023 at the age of 54 — with Soap Opera Digest recently, claiming he was “100% sober” when they were together.
The “Serving Sara” actor died from “acute effects of ketamine,” according to his autopsy report.
Quinlan and Perry were together from 2002 until 2003 after meeting at a tennis game, with the latter struggling with substance abuse throughout his life.
“We got on like a house on fire,” she lovingly recalled.
The soap star actually knew of the Canadian actor before their initial meeting, calling him “the cute guy by the elevator.”
The two lived in the same apartment building in Los Angeles when he first started out in Hollywood. But it wasn’t until Perry scored his hit role of Chandler Bing in the 1994 NBC sitcom that Quinlan realized who he was.
“I had the biggest crush on him, but I never saw him again because by the time the show was picked up, he had — like every actor does — moved to the Hollywood Hills,” she told the outlet.
“When Matthew and I embarked on a romantic relationship he was 100% sober and was very open about his previous struggles,” she said.
“That was his one fully sober year, and we were practically inseparable. One of the reasons he liked being with me was that I didn’t do drugs,” the “South of Nowhere” alum went on, adding that she “never” saw him drink or do drugs during their courtship.
In 1997, the “Fools Rush In” actor became addicted to Vicodin following a jet-ski accident. He entered rehab that same year.
He then relapsed in 2001 and went to in-patient rehabilitation once again in an effort to combat his Vicodin, methadone, amphetamines and alcohol abuse problems.
According to Quinlan, they stayed friends and were essentially “like brother and sister” after they split.
“He was the guy that every guy wanted to hang out with and every girl wanted to date,” she said. “He was the guy next door.”
Despite his star quality, Perry was often times “kind of unsure of himself.”
“He wasn’t, believe it or not, completely confident with girls, even though he dated the likes of Julia Roberts,” Quinlan added.
Perry dated a medley of women, including the Oscar winner, 56, in 1995, as well as model Yasmine Bleeth and Lizzy Caplan.
“I had no idea how much he was internally struggling because his main focus was always making other people happy and laughing,” she said.
But in the last few years, the two grew further apart, with Perry “not even trying to reach out” although Quinlan wanted to when he released his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.”
“I regret to this day that I did not call Matthew to tell him I was proud of him,” she told the outlet. “It took a lot of guts and bravery for him to write that book and be so brutally honest.”
It was when the “Dirty Girl” star found out about Perry’s passing last year that she was “devastated.”
“It wasn’t a shock but I still couldn’t believe it happened. And although we hadn’t seen each other in a while, I miss him very much,” she said. “He was truly a close friend.”
Knowing him “sober was the greatest gift of all,” she fondly remembered. “As the years went on, so many of us lost Matty little by little to his disease — and the important part of that sentence is that it is a disease.”
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