LOS ANGELES—For just a moment, in the middle of a news conference in a Los Angeles hotel room for the movie 17 Again, Matthew Perry appears to be channelling Chandler Bing. His Friends character, a master of the smart-aleck one-liner, was always happy to hit an easy lob out of the park. In the film, which opens April 17, Perry plays a 37-year-old man who was a basketball star in high school but gave up scholarship opportunities to marry his pregnant high-school sweetheart. Twenty years later, the baby is graduating and he feels he has wasted his life. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he becomes his younger self again (played by Zac Efron) and gets the second chance he has always wanted.

A reporter asks Perry if he’s done the math and would agree that his character’s daughter should be in college by now. The actor shoots back with faux incredulity, “That was the only logic problem you had with this movie?”

Since Efron and Perry play the same character at different ages, it made sense for the film’s director, Burr Steers, to ensure that the audience could see something of one in the other. Efron was particularly interested in studying Perry’s moves, and Steers has said in interviews that the younger actor watched old episodes of Friends and Perry’s short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Perry was less enthusiastic early on. “I finally realized on day five of rehearsals why he was looking at me so much,” he says. “But Burr is a very smart guy. He felt that it would be a good idea for us to rehearse together and to read each other’s lines for each other and that was a big part of the rehearsal process. Zac would say, ”˜How would you read this?’ and I think it ended up being a cool part of the movie.”

Perry’s own teenage years were somewhat complicated. He grew up in Ottawa and was a top-ranked Canadian junior tennis player when he was sent to Los Angeles at the age of 15 to live with his actor father, John Bennett Perry. He says that high school was fine but recalls that he took things too seriously. While he has developed a reputation for playing characters who make light of almost everything, he admits to having some regrets.

“I went to a high school that didn’t have many people in it,” he says. “There was a group of cool kids and a group of dorky kids, and I was probably the coolest of the dorky kids. But I am much happier now than I was at that age, and I think things get better. I think it has to do with taking things too seriously when you’re younger. I think you get a little lighter as you get older, so it takes care of itself and it gets better. I guess if I had one wish it would be that I could go back and not take everything so seriously.”