Matthew Perry’s Stepfather Keith Morrison Opens Up About Actor’s Death: “Larger Than Life Person”

Matthew Perry’s stepfather Keith Morrison is getting candid about his relationship with the Friends star nearly five months after the actor died at age 54.

The Dateline correspondent, who married Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry, in 1981, recently opened up to Hoda Kotb on the Making Space podcast about the difficult last few months as they continue to mourn Perry.

“As other people have told me hundreds of times. It doesn’t go away yet,” Morrison said. “It’s with you every day. It’s with you all the time.”

Perry died unexpectedly on Oct. 28 from the acute effects of the anesthetic ketamine, according to an autopsy released in December.

“There’s some new aspect of it that assaults your brain, and, you know, it’s not easy, especially for his mom,” Morrison added. “I don’t think I’m giving away too much by saying that toward the end of his life, they were closer than I had seen them for decades, and texting each other constantly and him sharing things with her that most middle-aged men don’t share with their mothers.”

Morrison also shared the same sentiment as many of Perry’s friends, such as Jennifer Aniston, in that the actor was doing well and seemed happy before he died.

“He said so, and he hadn’t said that for a long time,” he recalled. “It’s a source of comfort, but also, he didn’t get to have his third act, and that’s not fair. And as he said himself, ‘If I suddenly died, people would be shocked, but not too many people would be surprised.’ And he was right.”

When Kotb asked Morrison if he was surprised, he added, “It was the news you never want to get, but you think someday you might. So, yes and no, I guess is the answer to that.”

Morrison described The Odd Couple actor as a “larger than life person,” noting that he can “still feel the echo of it everywhere around here.” He also added that as Perry’s stepfather, he “never tried to replace his dad, ’cause dads are dads, but I was there for him and he knew it. And we were close.”

In November, nearly a month after Perry died, Morrison broke his silence on the actor’s death to encourage people to donate to the Matthew Perry Foundation. He wrote on X (formerly Twitter) at the time, “This is not the sort of thing I commonly do, this pitch. But this year is different. And tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. Do what you can; he would have been grateful.”