Matthew Langford Perry

Matthew Langford Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on August 19, 1969.[3] His mother, Suzanne Marie Morrison (née Langford, born 1948),[4] is a Canadian journalist who was press secretary to Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His father, John Bennett Perry (born 1941), is an American actor and former model.[5][6]

Perry's parents separated when he was a year old, and his mother married Canadian broadcast journalist Keith Morrison. Perry was mostly raised by his mother in Ottawa, Ontario, but he also lived briefly in Toronto and Montreal.[7] He attended Rockcliffe Park Public School and Ashbury College, a boarding school in Ottawa.[8][9] He had four younger maternal half-siblings—Caitlin, Emily, Will, and Madeline—as well as a younger paternal half-sister named Maria. His siblings "would stand and applaud" him for early performances.[10]

By the time he was 10, Perry started misbehaving. He stole money, smoked, let his grades slip, and beat up fellow student and future Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.[9][11] Perry later attributed his behavior to his feeling like a family outsider who no longer belonged, once his mother began having children with Morrison. As Perry wrote, "I was so often on the outside looking in, still that kid up in the clouds on a flight to somewhere else, unaccompanied."[10] At age 14, he began consuming alcohol and, by the time he was 18, was drinking every day.[12] Perry practiced tennis, often for 10 hours per day,[5] and became a top-ranked junior player in Canada with the possibility of a tennis career. But his prospects diminished when he moved from Ottawa, at age 15, to live with his father in Los Angeles, where competition was much tougher.[5][11][13]

At 15, Perry began studying acting at the Buckley School, a college-preparatory school in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 1987.[14] While in high school, he took improvisational comedy classes at L.A. Connection in Sherman Oaks.[15]