Matthew Perry’s stepfather has said the late Friends star “felt like he was beating” his struggles with addiction and “it’s not easy” coping with the grief.

Keith Morrison, an award-winning correspondent for Dateline NBC, said his stepson “didn’t get to have his third act, and that’s not fair”.

Speaking to NBC’s Today presenter Hoda Kotb on her Making Spaces podcast, he said Perry – who was best known for playing Chandler Bing in Friends – was a “larger than life person” who “lit up a room”.

“He was goofy. He was funny. He was acerbic. But even if he didn’t say a word, he was the centre of attention,” he added.

The 76-year-old, who has been married to Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry Morrison, since 1981, said the actor felt he was in a good place shortly before his death after long periods of drug and alcohol addiction.

“He felt like he was beating it,” he said. “But you never beat it, and he knew that, too.

“That’s a whirlwind of a life – to get involved in a programme that became as wildly successful as it was, to be fighting an addiction that was so virulent, that went after him so hard.”

Morrison said the grief continues to be difficult to cope with after Perry died at the end of last October at the age of 54.

“It’s with you every day,” he said. “It’s with you all the time and there’s some new aspect of it that assaults your brain. It’s not easy.”

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Morrison added he and Perry were “chalk and cheese” but “we got along fine”.

“I was there for him, and he knew it,” he added.

The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office said in its post-mortem, released in December, that the actor had been “reportedly clean for 19 months”.

The report said Perry’s death was an accident from the “acute effects” of ketamine. He was said to have been using infusion therapy for depression and anxiety with his last treatment more than a week before his death.

Perry was pronounced dead after being found unresponsive in the swimming pool at his LA home.

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