Thanks, Matthew Perry.

To say I was a fan of Friends would be an understatement. If you say a classic line or story arc from the show, I can definitely tell you what season it’s from, and maybe even the exact episode. Like many, I was charmed by the six stars of the sitcom, and in particular became a Matthew Perry fan. His brand of comedy: a cool mixture of intelligent sarcasm, with hints of self loathing and clever physicality (falls and gestures) struck a chord with my insecure teenage personality and made me laugh every time. I remember a moment where it clicked in my head… “I think my favorite actor is Matthew Perry.”

During the run of Friends, I was usually a fan of any films that the six stars shot between seasons. As for Matthew Perry’s work, I’ve always loved Fools Rush In, and as it pertains to this page, the Whole Nine Yards. The 1999 dark comedy with Perry, Bruce Willis, Natasha Henstridge, Amanda Peet, the late Michael Clarke Duncan and Kevin Pollak is one of those films that if I give it about a year, it will genuinely make me laugh out loud again. (By the way, I just listed that entire cast from memory without Google. Superfan. Oh yeah, Rosanna Arquette and Harland Williams are in there too.)

One of my favorite things about the film is it’s main shooting locations: Montreal and Chicago. They are obviously two awesome cities, and they really are additional characters in the film. In Montreal, they wholly embrace the French-Canadian vibes, by making Matthew Perry’s wife (Arquette) French-Canadian with a thick accent, and have Amanda Peet and a few characters speak a little French, as well as poke fun of some of the cultural differences between Canada and the US.

I’m sharing all of this to pretty much repeat a story I told on this website about seven years ago. When I visited Montreal in 2012, one of my main goals was to find one of the shooting locations from the Whole Nine Yards. It is a fantastic vista of the city named Mount Royal. After some wrong turns, I was able to find it back in 2012. Naturally, on this visit in 2019, I knew exactly where to find it, and this time I made a point to visit at sunrise.

You really can’t ask for much more than watching the sun bathe the skyline of a great city. So in some weird way, thanks, Matthew Perry, not only for the work you’ve put on screen forever, but for that work motivating me to want to catch a sunrise view and say that I have a favorite spot in Montreal, Canada: