On October 28th, actor Matthew Perry passed away at the age of 54. He was found unresponsive in his hot tub by his assistant at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The actor was well-known for playing Chandler Bing on the NBC television sitcom Friends from 1994 to 2004. It was the role that launched his career and made him a worldwide sensation, however, Perry hated this one thing about his character: the signature intonation.
The actor begged the producers to remove this but after no changes, he took the matter into his own hands. He created that intonation called “Chandler speak” when he was a kid, but it got too much at one point.
Matthew Perry hated Chandler Bing’s signature intonation
In his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing actor Matthew Perry revealed that he hated his Friends character, Chandler Bing’s signature intonation and “had to beg the producers” to remove it (via Variety),
“That particular cadence – could it be more annoying? – had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I’d explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in season six and then beyond.”
Perry constantly modulated his voice on the show and fans loved this, but eventually, it got too much for Perry so he decided to get rid of it himself.
Matthew Perry created the “Chandler Speak“
Fans called it the “Chandler speak” and Perry once revealed in an interview with Deadline that he created the “Chandler speak” when he was a kid growing up in Ottawa, Canada,
“I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit. I was back in Ottawa with my childhood friends the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had.”
Apart from Friends, Perry was well known for his work in movies like Fools Rush In (1997), Almost Heroes (1998), Three to Tango (1999), The Whole Nine Yards (2000), Serving Sara (2002), The Whole Ten Yards (2005), and 17 Again (2009). As of now, the cause of Perry’s death is being investigated but several media outlets have claimed that he died from drowning.
