Matthew Perry almost turned down an audition for the role of Chandler Bing on "Friends."

Imagine - Matthew Perry playing the iconic character Chandler Bing on "Friends" for a decade, passing on most of the auditions that made him a star. in 2015, when he appeared on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" (and according to People), Perry recalled that in 1994, a "terrible" manager told him "there was no money" and he was desperate to find work.

"It happened to be the first year that 'Friends' was shot, and I was off the market because I had taken a pilot job called 'LAX 2194,' about a baggage handler at L.A. airport in 2194. So I was wearing a futuristic shirt. So I was wearing a futuristic shirt, and little people were playing the aliens, and I had to organize the aliens' baggage.

He was committed to his role in LAX 2194, but when he received the script for Friends, he found it "hilarious and wonderful": "There was a role that was perfect for me, but I was going crazy that I couldn't do it because of the baggage handler show. It drove me nuts."

Everything changed when a Fox executive declared LAX 2194 "the worst thing we've seen in our lives." That executive had this to say about Perry: "I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it. We could hire him for a little show called 'Friends Like Us.'

Perry then joined the cast with Jennifer Aniston's Rachel Green, Courteney Cox's Monica Geller, Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe Buffay, David Schwimmer's Ross Geller, and Matt Leblanc's Joey Tribbiani The The show ran for ten seasons from 1994 to 2004.

In his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry remembers praying for his life to change a few weeks before auditioning for Friends. About three weeks before my audition for Friends, I was alone on the tenth floor of an apartment building at Sunset and Doheny. There it said that Sheen was in some kind of trouble again, and I remember thinking, 'Why do I care, I'm a celebrity? Out of nowhere I found myself on my knees, eyes tightly closed, praying. I had never done anything like this before."

His prayer said: "God, You can do whatever You want to me. Just make me famous."

Three weeks later, I was cast in "Friends. But God Almighty had not forgotten the first part of that prayer either," he wrote, seemingly referring to his struggle with addiction, which plagued him for nearly a quarter century until his sobriety in May 2021.

Perry died yesterday at age 54.