Keanu Reeves stunned by Matthew Perry’s book insults

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Keanu Reeves won’t be in any rush to read Matthew Perry’s new memoir after the Friends star insulted him in his book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

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“Keanu thought the comments came out of left field,” an insider tells Us Weekly about the digs Perry makes at Reeves in his recently released memoir.

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“It’s kind of backfired on Matthew anyway, which is why he had to apologize,” the source added.

In one passage, Perry opens up on his friendship with the late actor River Phoenix and writes, “River was a beautiful man, inside and out — too beautiful for this world, it turned out. It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down. Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?”

Later, when he recounts his reaction to his Almost Heroes co-star Chris Farley’s death, Perry writes, “I punched a hole through Jennifer Aniston’s dressing room wall when I found out. Keanu Reeves walks among us.”

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In a statement to PEOPLE, Perry apologized for the dig at Reeves saying: “I’m actually a big fan of Keanu. I just chose a random name, my mistake. I apologize. I should have used my own name instead.”

In the memoir, which was released this week, Perry also claims that he made out with Valerie Bertinelli while her then-husband, the late Eddie Van Halen, was passed out drunk just a few feet away

“Valerie and I had a long, elaborate make-out session. It was happening — maybe she felt the same way I did. I told her I had thought about doing that for a long time, and she had said it right back to me,” Perry writes.

Bertinelli, 62, responded to Perry’s revelations in a TikTok video set to Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero as the lyrics, “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem,” played and she tearfully waved at the camera.

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“Anyone misbehave in their 20s and early 30s?” Bertinelli captioned the clip. “Are you mortified?”

Elsewhere in his upcoming memoir, Perry reflects on his relationship with Julia Roberts and why he ended it.

“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable.

“So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.

“She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”

The 17 Again star also peels back the curtain on his harrowing battle with drug addiction.

“I didn’t know how to stop. If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com