Ione Skye looks back on her trysts with Matthew Perry

In Ione Skye’s new memoir, Say Everything, the actress looks back on her romances with famous men including her Say Anything costar John Cusack, Red Hot Chili Peppers rocker Anthony Keidis, Beastie Boys guitarist Adam Horovitz, and more. She recounts a time, too, when she hooked up with late Friends star Matthew Perry.

Skye and Perry costarred in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, the 1988 movie in which the late River Phoenix played the title character. The movie was Perry’s first, but Skye’s second, so she remembered giving him a pep talk before shooting began.

Years later, he called her “out of the blue” and invited her over for a “sober drink” as he was abstaining from alcohol.

“I only had to think about it for approximately 15 seconds,” Skye wrote. “I hadn’t talked to Matthew since we made A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon almost 20 years earlier, and I normally didn’t accept booty calls, which I assumed this was . . . but it was Matthew Perry! I was curious, and he was adorable and handsome and rich and presumably sober, so I said yes.”

They planned to meet up on an afternoon when Skye’s nanny was there to take care of her daughter. She wore heels with a pinstriped pencil skirt, and it all made her feel like she was Doris Day meeting up with Rock Hudson in an old movie.

“The Matthew who met me at the door of his penthouse apartment overlooking Sunset Plaza was taller than I remembered, and quite dashing,” Skye wrote. “He still had a great head of hair, a playful twist to his smile, and laughing blue eyes — lined with crows’-feet now. Somehow I didn’t see Chandler from Friends, I saw the boy I knew when we were 16 and 17.”

She said they drank bubbly water and smoked cigarettes, as they shared what they had been doing, in his kitchen. She couldn’t help but picture them as teenagers. He asked her if she wanted to watch a movie, but she had other ideas.

Their sex was “perfectly pleasant,” Skye said, but neither “gave it our all.”

When he said its been fun and they should do it again some time, she suggested they meet the same time the next week.

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“It hadn’t actually been that fun, but the ingenue in me still believed every­ no-strings fling had the potential to become a great romance,” Skye wrote. Their next meeting was just as “emotionally distant,” and it was the end.

“That was the last time I ever saw him, though for years he’d text to say hi every so often. Even through his distance, he was always endearing and sincere. The last time I’d hear from Matthew was on October 16, 2023, about a week before his death. He wrote: Hi! I hope all is well. I was meditating (I meditate now) and “In Your Eyes” started playing. And I instantly thought of you and how beautiful you are . . . I hope you are healthy and happy.”

She recalled she was happy and “in a completely different place in my life by then,” so she didn’t flirt back. But she was warm to her old friend.

“I do wish I’d called him, to properly catch up, but no one talked on the phone anymore,” Skye wrote. “So, after a brief, sweet text exchange, we signed off as friends.”

Perry died of a ketamine overdose in 2023, when he was 54. Skye then shared that last exchange, which she captioned, “I’m very, very sad. Loved this guy.”

Say Everything: A Memoir is in bookstores now.