As members of Matthew Perry‘s inner circle for decades, manager Doug Chapin and publicist Lisa Kasteler had never, until now, done a joint interview about their famous client — not during any of the professional highs as Perry ascended the ranks to become one of Hollywood’s brightest and most beloved comedy stars for playing Chandler Bing on the global juggernaut Friends, nor when Perry weathered personal lows in private due to a tumultuous battle with substance abuse.
Instead, Chapin and Kasteler provided a soft place to land for their A-list client, who made the decision to wrestle free from the shame and stigma of addiction by speaking for himself in a revelatory 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which became a New York Times best-seller. In it, the actor explained that rather than fame or Friends, he hoped his legacy would be the work he did in helping other addicts and alcoholics achieve sobriety.
In a way, his words and that commitment to service delivered reason enough for Chapin and Kasteler to go on the record now. After Perry’s tragic death at age 54 from the acute effects of ketamine, they mobilized in a matter of days to keep his mission alive by launching the Matthew Perry Foundation.
Both Chapin and Kasteler charted new paths with the foundation by retiring from their previous gigs — Chapin as a manager-producer and Kasteler as founding partner of the A-list publicity firm Wolf-Kasteler — but they remain as close as ever with other members of Perry’s team of trusted confidantes. To mark the organization’s one year anniversary, Chapin and Kasteler gathered for a Zoom interview with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the “emotional” work, what they’ve learned over the past year and how they managed to turn tragedy into purpose.
“The gift he left us was that we all still have each other. Even though we’ve lost him, the bond that we created over these decades of being a unit, it continues,” explains Chapin. Adds Kasteler: “When people ask me how long I worked with him, I say that I’m still working with him.”
I want to acknowledge how rare it is for the two of you to be doing an interview together, which speaks to the work of the foundation. How are you feeling about doing an interview? Am I right to consider this a first?
KASTELER You’re right. Because Annette and I weren’t those publicists that promoted ourselves. We’d see other publicists quoted in articles, and we both were brought up that it isn’t about us, it’s about the clients. But if I were to start talking now that I’m on this side of it, the reason is because of the passion we have for what we’re doing.
CHAPIN It’s part of the reality of what we’re doing, and that, for both of us, we have a similarly long history of letting clients speak for themselves. It’s not our job to have public opinions. But the foundation is our last assignment for Matthew, and if he were still with us, he would be having this conversation with you. But he’s not here, so we have no choice but to step in and say, “Here’s what we are doing and here’s how we are accomplishing it.” In that way, it’s not that different except we are filling in a gap that he otherwise would be filling himself.
You said “last assignment.” Is that how you view the work for Matthew?
CHAPIN His last statement, which is in the book but he also said to us, is that he wanted to be remembered more for helping people than he was for being Chandler [on Friends] and for being famous. As soon as we lost him, we continued that mission. Lisa had started conversations with him already about a foundation so this seemed an obvious and important thing for us to do to accomplish that goal.
KASTELER I spoke to him maybe three days before he passed away, because I was calling him to tell him that I was retiring but that we were going to continue. I was hoping we would continue to work on the foundation and a few other things that we had discussed. Matthew was a texter, so I texted him to ask if I could come over. I wanted to see him in person in a couple of days. He said, “Yes of course but you have to tell me right now what it’s about. I can’t wait.” Then we got on the phone, and I told him that I was stepping away from [Wolf-Kasteler]. Four or five minutes into the conversation he said to me, “Doesn’t this just mean that you can have more time for me?” We hung up and twenty seconds later, he called again and said, “Doesn’t this just mean you have more time for me?” [Laughs] Then, obviously, tragedy hit.
What had happened before that is that we traveled for the book, and Matthew was doing large Q&As in several cities. I think that is when he could, for the first time, see the impact he had on people who saw him as Matthew, not Chandler. The reaction was just extraordinary. It fed into this idea that he was enough. That is something that he kept hitting on in the book because he never felt like he was enough. But he was more than enough and he could help people because he was so beloved. That’s really what the genesis of this was, and he could see that this was something he wanted to do. I mean, Matthew was always doing it. It’s not a secret in town. He was taking people into his house [and helping them]. We heard another story a few days ago about someone who lived in the house on and off for a year. He was always quietly supportive of people with the disease.
The book and the tour stops were pivotal and very eye opening for him in terms of this work. His writing had gone on for, I don’t know, maybe three years or something before it had been published. He would start and stop at various times, and send me a chapter in the form of a very, very long text. The question was always, “Am I ready to share this? Does this have a purpose?” The final deciding factor was that he felt the act of exposing all the nitty-gritty of his experiences with the disease would help people who were struggling with the disease. It would be a source of help to the people who needed it but also their loved ones because it’s a very hard thing to understand from the outside. He felt that those things were more important than his continued privacy around this. It’s one thing to acknowledge you have the disease [of addiction], and another to say, “Here’s what it really looks like in my life. Oh, and by the way, I’m world famous.” That’s just staggering to me when I think about it having learned what I learned in the past year about this. He was saying, “These are my worst secrets and this is all the stuff I’ve hidden from people.” And after he shared it, he received all this love back. It was an extremely healing and important experience for him, and it inspired the rest of the work we’re doing now.
How do you define the mission?
CHAPIN We can talk about some of the direct impact things we’ve been doing, but one of the primary goals came as a sort of marching order from him — to attack stigma. What we’re talking about here is people not understanding addiction as a disease. That is a hurdle for people to reach out for help, and it’s a hurdle for people around them who don’t understand what’s going on and how they can help. It’s a primary goal and a large objective but it’s also the companion to everything else that we’re doing. We will be supporting people and organizations to help fill in those gaps in the process of recovery, which begins with someone raising their hand to speak up and get help. The big block to that is stigma.
KASTELER 48 million people in this country have the disease and only a fifth of them will seek treatment. There are many reasons why they don’t feel they can raise their hand, and that’s something Matthew wrote about and talked about. I know without a doubt that if he hadn’t been ashamed and felt he had to hide it — obviously there were professional pressures to hide it — he’d be here. I just know that. If we do nothing else with this foundation, if we can really make a dent in this lack of understanding what this is, then that’s a success. If you asked me what success looks like, that’s success.
He passed on Oct. 28, and the foundation was announced on Nov. 3. That may have seemed fast to a lot of people but now I understand that you had been discussing this for some time. Can you share a little bit about those discussions and how you were able to step forward so quickly with a launch during what I can only imagine was a horrific time?
KASTELER There were a few things that we were doing during a horrific time. The conversations about the foundation started happening before that time. I actually sat him down the summer before and explained how it could work. [After his passing], we knew that there would be this unbelievable outpouring of love for Matthew — I mean, astounding. We found out later, [Alexei Navalny] had written about him. The King and Queen of England reached out to us to get to the family. We needed a place where people could go if they wanted to donate to a foundation. We very quickly were able to do that with the National Philanthropic Trust, and we started working with an amazing social impact agency, Wondros. They are extraordinary, and they are our creative partners but they also do a lot of research for us.
CHAPIN Lisa is talking about some of the tools that helped make it happen quickly once we got started, but you also have to think in context of everything else including the book, both in terms of the impact the book had on him and the public. That sparked a bunch of conversations about how to continue that impact. We explored a documentary of some sort. He was trying to come up with a way to have a kind of talk show that would be an addict-to-addict talk show. We were working with some wonderful producers on figuring out a way to translate the book into a project like a limited series. The foundation was part of this general conversation of, how do we continue to expand on this moment that seems to be so helpful to people?
Remember when the book was released, everybody was fielding stories of how the book really changed their experience. They read the book and found recovery, or they reached out to a family member who was in need of recovery. There were so many of these stories swirling around, leading to a general desire to continue this in some format. Everything else came to a screeching halt, obviously, but this was the one path that we could continue on to fulfill that.
KASTELER I’ve had other losses in my life, and I know that getting back to work helped me significantly. [Doing this] made it feel like he wasn’t really gone, I guess.
CHAPIN You’re talking to two people who woke up every day…
KASTELER Crying…
CHAPING Yes, crying when he died. But we spent so many decades of our lives asking ourselves the question, “What are we doing for him today?” When he died, it was very natural to ask ourselves the same question, “What can we do for him?”
KASTELER When people ask me how long I worked with him, I say that I’m still working with him.
Doug, could any of those projects that you mentioned — a documentary or limited series, etc. — continue without him as a memorial or tribute in some form?
CHAPIN First of all, the family is now not inclined to. But even when Matthew was involved in those conversations, he explored the options and those were not the avenue he wanted to go down. We’ve been declining documentaries pretty consistently, and any potential translation of the book is the same answer. The general feeling among family and friends is that he told his story [in the book] so let him have the last word. That kind of eliminates the appeal of documentaries. The book is so reliant on his presence that anytime you expand a piece of literature, it involves making judgments. How would you take a section and make it reflective of what that moment was? Would it be a way for something to become dialogue? He was going to have to co-write it and that would be his older self having a conversation with his younger self in it. Once he died, it became the same answer. We had to leave his telling of the story to him.
You talked about the mission of the foundation and its focus on stigma. How did you identify the focus of where you would allocate resources and which organizations you wanted to support?
KASTELER We didn’t really have to search for the mission because we had the book, and that gave us a foundation. Then, addiction affects such a large amount of people that we felt like we wanted to go where we knew people needed the help, where they might not get it otherwise. The grassroots recovery grants came about because we knew [that California] could possibly have a $78 billion deficit so there were these organizations, obviously, that were in jeopardy. We did a lot of research and we knew that we wanted a very diverse group of grantees, and that’s what we found. Some have an annual budget of $50,000. They couldn’t believe that we were giving them thousands of dollars. I sat in a room for two days calling people to say, “Hi, here’s some money.”
Furthermore, what we’ve learned through working in philanthropy is that giving unrestricted money is almost unheard of. The amount of work these organizations have to do and the number of hoops they are forced to jump through to create a grant or to sustain it [can be overwhelming]. Some of them couldn’t believe it when we called from the Matthew Perry Foundation; they thought it was a scam. They probably didn’t believe it until the check arrived.
CHAPIN We were first concerned about organizations that were going to lose government funding. A lot of organizations out there aren’t really big enough or well-funded enough to do grant applications and go through all the necessary processes to get them. So, there was a need there when we went looking. We chose to fill those holes because it was all so consistent in Matthew’s notion of having direct impact. These are very on-the-street, hands-on type of impact with people, not these large theoretical organizations.
KASTELER We weren’t looking for name-on-the-wall kind of philanthropy. We don’t need it. What we want to do is bring help and hope.
How was it to sit in a room for those two days making the calls?
KASTELER What have I ever done that would be close to that? It was extraordinary. People cried. People called it a God shot. I mean, they just couldn’t believe it. They were overwhelmed. It was extraordinary.
CHAPIN We sent a couple members of the team around to the various organizations because part of this is to build up a community so that these groups can all start exchanging best practices. We wanted to create a group that was diverse enough so that they would have things to share about the experiences of helping the people. They then could build up a body of information for themselves and for us so that as we go to other states and continue to do this work, we can keep accumulating the most effective practices in terms of supporting people as they go through the process of recovery.
KASTELER I’m a big admirer of Melinda Gates, and in the recent Vanity Fair piece, she talked about her approach [to philanthropy] now that she’s doing it all on her own. She approaches philanthropy from the inside out, not in the way of walking into an organization knowing what they need but doing it by creating a dialogue by listening to the people who are living it and dealing with it on a daily basis. That’s a fundamental feeling we have about what we’re doing, we want to bring people in, hear them and see how we can be effective.
CHAPIN When we were researching this, we also partnered with community leaders in different communities because we wanted to make sure we were all over California. Some leaders in those places made recommendations about organizations they thought were being effective in their communities. We ended up with a very big list that we culled down to the people we thought were most interesting with an eye toward supporting diversity — in terms of race, geography and the types of approaches to recovery that they have.
There’s an organization in a very rural part of California that acts as a multi-purpose hub, and they’ve woven themselves into the community through social services and law enforcement. They have a food bank so they are supporting people that way. When people were either being compelled to go into recovery, were in need of it and open to it, there was a system in place. There are places that are actually in Los Angeles that don’t really have that issue so much, but have addressed the mission in different ways.
KASTELER There’s a baseball team at the Mariposa Heritage House in a small town outside of Yosemite. They have a baseball team called the Sober Sluggers that’s made up of people who have gone through recovery. They’ve played against law enforcement parole officers. We are creating uniforms for them. The people at the organization thank us for supporting the baseball team because it’s a way of creating community, and it’s a way of competing on equal footing that can be life affirming for them and a way to support their recovery.
Was that a decision that you and Doug made together to offer unrestricted grants and have no pats on the back, names on doors, etc.?
KASTELER There may be mentions of us, a name on a website. But it’s not just us, there’s a team here [at the Matthew Perry Foundation]. We want to mention somebody else because there’s a trio here. Her name is Lisa Ferguson and she was Matthew’s business manager-everything. She actually had worked with him longer than Doug and I did. She’s the secretary-treasurer of the foundation.
We made the decision about grants and giving through listening and learning. Often when somebody gets a grant, they can’t use that money for a year. They have to first say how they’re going to use it, then they get the grant and must show that they are using the money that way. They have to jump through so many hoops.
CHAPIN There’s a food bank that wasn’t allowed to give food to unhoused people because if they didn’t have cooking or storage facilities, the government wouldn’t allow for them to receive it. So they started cooking on site so they could give completed meals to people. Some of these larger organizations are well-intentioned but they must weave their way through all these regulations in order to meet their mission. It seemed clear to us that we wanted to fill holes. The hole here is that money is hard to get so we can give them that and they can use it as they please. These people are helping those on their recovery journeys and doing it in a variety of different ways but there are gaps in their fundraising or their budgets. We can fill those gaps and help.
KASTELER We’re kind of anti-bureaucracy. I’m insubordinate anyway.
CHAPIN As Lisa says, we keep talking about us, but there is a team that Lisa has built. More remarkable than getting a website up so quickly was how fast she put together a team of really smart people. There are a couple more senior people who have worked in the foundation and charity space before, some young people in support positions who have experience in charitable organizations and know how to call and what to look for in terms of being effective. We had our own education but we don’t rely on just us, obviously.
KASTELER It was really important to us that the people we work with not only be like-minded but that we could trust them. Obviously that is a necessity for what comes along with Matthew, and we haven’t been burned. They’re just extraordinarily dedicated. The people who work with us at Wondros, they’ve got a lot of clients and I don’t know how they have time for anybody else but us. They’re so dedicated.
CHAPIN It’s also worth noting that our board is made up primarily of other people who have been in Matthew’s life for a very long time. I appreciate that we’re the face of it, but it’s a group of people who are very bonded through their experience with Matthew.
KASTELER It’s like in any other business, you’re only as good as the people you have with you.
That speaks to Matthew. What does it say about him that he had all of these people around him, including you, that he stayed with for decades?
KASTELER People jump around, that’s why people say, “We were like Kleenex.” Fortunately for Annette and I, the company didn’t lose a lot of business but people do change their reps. Matthew never did from the beginning.
CHAPIN I have to say it was a two-way street. He was very loyal to us and we were all fiercely loyal to him.
KASTELER Fiercely.
CHAPIN The result of that, while he was alive, meant that he always had a reliable family in his business life, for lack of a better phrase, that were always not only helping him achieve what he wanted to achieve but [a group of people] who were protecting him and that he could rely on emotionally. We bump into stigma here, too. We were here for him through all the bumps in the road, and we stuck with him. That’s why I say that it was a two-way street. The gift he left us was that we all still have each other. Even though we’ve lost him, the bond that we created over these decades of being a unit, it continues.
I see that the foundation has distributed $400,000 in its first year to so many organizations. I don’t have time to ask you about all of them but there is this interesting program that serves incarcerated individuals through a telehealth program…?
CHAPIN Dr. Andrew Herring works in Alameda County at Highland Hospital running the emergency room. I’m so impressed with him. The hole that we’re helping him with is with a program for pre-release of prisoners in the jail system, people who have accomplished some recovery within the jails. The thing is, when they’re released, where do they go from there? To the bus stop? There’s often no connection to the next step. Dr. Herring had this idea — God bless him — to engage prior to release through a telehealth panel that connects with people so they can have a continuity of care with all kinds of support for them. He started doing these video introductions to the group to start the engagement and the connection. He was doing that one day a week at one jail, and we’re able to help him expand to five days a week so that he can reach more people [with the Public Health Institute]. We’re also doing it to build up data so that we can establish its effectiveness in the hope that we can have more evidence to expand it to other jails around the state and country.
KASTELER Sixty-five percent of the people in the jails have the disease [of addiction], and we’re told that it’s cheaper for the state to let them die than it is to help them. What Dr. Herring is doing matches the personality of the foundation and we’re really, really excited to be helping him. He’s amazing and brilliant, as is Dr. Sarah Wakeman in Boston.
Great segue, because I wanted to ask you about Dr. Wakeman at Massachusetts General Hospital, with whom you’ve partnered to launch the Matthew Perry Fellowship in Addiction Medicine. How did that come about?
KASTELER She’s extraordinary. There was an article in The New York Times earlier this year about addiction in America and she was quoted throughout. We were able to reach out to her, and what we’ve learned is that medical students maybe get a two-hour conversation about addiction. There are no questions on exams about it either. What Dr. Wakeman has done is created a year-long program that doctors can participate in so they can be taught how to treat addiction. Then they go out and practice whatever discipline they are in, and there are trained people in the field who know what they’re doing. We’re really excited. It’s the first time we’ve put his name on anything. This will be an ongoing relationship. They will name the first fellow in January and that person will start their education next summer.
CHAPIN It’s education funding but it’s also life funding. The way that Dr. Wakeman has designed it is that the fellowship requires housing and support while they are studying because it’s not a part of their medical school education so they can’t borrow against it, for lack of a better word. This fellowship will fund both the education portion but also it will support them while they are going through the process. Part of the problem as to why they aren’t getting the education is that there isn’t a lot of support for it. After a million years in medical school, people need jobs. Rather than jumping straight into whatever specialty they are in so that they can start paying rent, we wanted to help support people while they are getting trained to do this work.
KASTELER We want to populate the field. It’s that simple. There aren’t enough trained physicians out there so, again, we found a hole and we’re going to fill it.
Will you be involved in choosing the fellow or is Dr. Wakeman handling that?
CHAPIN I think it will sort of boil down to her, very kindly, suggesting who the right person is for it. We’re not pretending to be experts in anything. We have been looking for people who have the knowledge and are doing the good work. Our job is just to be smart enough to know which ones to support.
KASTELER We’ve been told often enough that there’s no name more powerful in this space than Matthew’s. We are very respectful of that and very humbled by that. We have the power to convene. That is also really something that is a high priority for us, and we’re in conversations about several versions of convenings which will happen in the next year.
CHAPIN We need to expand the environment. What we want to do with our grassroots efforts is sharing best practices, sharing information. One of our consultants tells us that when he goes to seminars or group talks, he gets there and it’s always a whole bunch of doctors or professors talking about research. He asks, “Where are the addicts? Where are the people with lived experience?” We keep finding that there are so many silos and pods, some of which do really good work and others that do really sucky work. There isn’t enough cross-pollination happening. That’s one of the things we hope to address with these convenings.
Can you share more about the vision for the convenings or gatherings? Like a summit or seminar?
CHAPIN We’re in the process of designing them now. It will be gatherings of people with different experiences speaking on specific subjects. But as much as anything else, it will be an opportunity to bring people together so they can have open conversations.
KASTELER But also I want us to shake it up a little bit. I want to do these convenings, but I want the events to send a message, to wake people up. It can’t just be a lovely day spent talking about the work. Everybody’s been touched by this. Everybody has a friend or family member. We need to bring it out into the daylight.
What are you most proud of thus far?
CHAPIN I think I can speak for Lisa about this too when I say that we’re most proud to breathe life into Matthew’s legacy. To accomplish that thing he wanted in a way that now we can look back on this past year knowing he would be so pleased with this. That’s the thing I’m most proud of and I can tell she agrees by her nodding her head…
KASTELER I couldn’t agree more. He knew we’d go through walls for him. We did go through walls for him. But I think he would be blown away by what we’ve accomplished this year. The relationship we had with Matthew and the decades we spent with him was more than just, “I’m your publicist and you’re my client.” Or, with Doug, “I’m your manager and you’re my client.” That got blurred and he trusted us — that means everything. Because of that trust, we have to succeed and we will.
What would Matthew say about what you’ve accomplished this past year?
CHAPIN He’d tease us.
KASTELER He would definitely make fun of us for crying as much as we cried, that’s for sure.
CHAPIN He would say, “Thank you.”
KASTELER Matthew was big on expressing gratitude. That was another rare quality, in my experience.
Tackling addiction is emotional work. How are you managing?
CHAPIN It’s emotional work in a variety of ways. In truth, we’re not personally engaged with the clients. We are supporting people who are. But we hear the moving stories, and there are frustrating stories about interactions with various bureaucracies. The thing that keeps it emotional for us is Matthew. It’s his story. What’s really been reinforced to us, and something we learn over and over again, is that his story is the same story as so many other people with the disease. He had more money while some people have less money. There are all kinds of societal, gender, geographical differences between people who are suffering. But the thing they have in common is the struggle.
We were very intimately involved with his life, his struggle and his journey but we just keep going back to his book when we don’t understand something or we are looking for a new way to help. “Explain that to me, again, Matthew.” That’s what’s most emotional for me and I’m trying to finish this sentence without starting to cry. It’s a way to keep him alive with us.
KASTELER I’ve worked in the business long enough to know that people who were famous who had this struggle, eventually the public turns on them. The business turns on them. It’s like, “Enough. Just go away, get better or don’t get better. Whatever happens — but I’m sick of it.” That never happened to him. I hammered him for 28 years about how beloved he was and he couldn’t see it. But I saw the shift when we were out on tour for the book. I couldn’t get through to him but he saw it. He didn’t know where to put that. That, to me, is extraordinary. What he had to carry every day of his life. Listen, I’ve had clients pass away before, but this was like a building fell on top of us. Especially because he had been doing good and the conversations were happening about what we were going to do. Then he was gone. I don’t know how to say it, but it’s not good. I don’t like it.
CHAPIN I will say that I’m very happy that on the anniversary of his passing we have accomplished so much and that we can spend this time talking about the things that have been good that he left behind for us. The one thing that we have not talked about yet is that we’ve been able to do the work thanks to a ton of fans and civilians who have donated as well as through his estate and with the support of his family’s founding investment in our organization.
I’m glad you brought that up, because I noticed some online chatter about the donations and why there was a need for them, considering his estate…?
CHAPIN There was a fabulous showing of support and there continues to be an outpouring of people supporting it. The book continues to sell and therefore reach more people. Although the death was so abrupt, Matthew had made his desires clear before he died. We have the founding money from him and from his estate with the support of his family but one of the things that we’re going to do now is move into the fundraising phase. We wanted to make clear our desires for the work that we want to do but the proof to demonstrate that we can do it. That’s the pivot point of the anniversary because beyond talking about how much we miss him, we can speak to his legacy, what he left behind and the work that we’re continuing to do for him.
KASTELER We are fighting against the perception that because it’s Matthew, that means we’re fully funded and we don’t have a money problem. That’s not true. We got a very nice start but fundraising is a high priority for us.
CHAPIN Especially because of how ambitious we are. It was a very generous start and it’s enabled us to do the work that we’re doing and to make some commitments for the future. But if we really want to fully realize the dream, then we are going to need more money.
How can people help?
CHAPIN Reach out to the website and people can donate there either digitally or by sending a check. If people are interested in larger conversations about large-scale support, we are more than happy to have those conversations and they can send us a message.
When he passed, his words about the disease and addiction traveled so far and wide. The one I saw shared most often is this: “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing mentioned. I want [helping others] to be the thing that’s mentioned, and I’m going to live the rest of my life proving that.” That’s a powerful statement, and what I imagine is guiding you.
CHAPIN Very much so.
KASTELER We’re going to do it.
English (US) ·