Jennie Garth is still processing the deaths of Luke Perry and Shannen Doherty.
Garth, 52, opened up about the deaths of her Beverly Hills, 90210 costars during a Wednesday, March 26, appearance on the “Two Jersey Js” podcast hosted by The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Jackie Goldschneider and Jennifer Fessler.
“It doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t make sense to my brain,” Garth said of Perry and Doherty’s deaths. “I live in a world where they still are alive in my mind, so it’s very hard to understand that they’re not here physically.”
Garth played Kelly Taylor on the hit Fox teen drama, which aired from 1990 to 2000, for all 10 seasons. Doherty played Brenda Walsh for the first four seasons, while Perry played bad boy Dylan McKay from seasons 1 to 6 and again in seasons 9 and 10, the show’s last.
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Perry died at the age of 52 in March 2019 after suffering a massive stroke. Doherty died in July 2024 after a year-long battle with cancer. She was 53.
Last year, Garth admitted that her costars’ deaths had had a profound impact on her.
“It made me feel very fearful, especially just with Luke dying and now Shannen,” Garth told Tori Spelling on their “90210MG” podcast last July. “I just feel like, I don’t know, it could be any of us [that] could go at any moment. That kind of feeling … yeah, that’s scary.”
“It’s like a piece of your foundation that [is gone],” Garth told listeners while talking about Perry, her onscreen love interest for years. “No one will ever really understand unless they were there with us then [and] they went through the experience with us.”
She added, “It’s kind of hard to believe that other people understand that connection.”
Garth explained that Doherty’s death brought up a lot of those same feelings. “It’s crazy that we could be shocked knowing that she was sick and knowing how hard she was fighting, but it still felt shocking,” she confessed.
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The actress admitted that she “never thought [Doherty] would succumb to cancer” because of how much of a “fighter” she was. (Doherty was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. Three years after going into remission in 2017, the cancer returned as stage IV. The cancer spread to her brain in 2023.)
“It was just shocking and makes you pissed, mad, sad, all the feelings because and then [you’re] like, ‘What the f—?’ Because she’s the one person that you didn’t see this happening [to],” Garth added.
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Despite being heartbroken to lose another friend within their 90210 family, Garth said she got “so much strength” from “growing up” beside Doherty.
“I learned a lot, you know, about how to stand up for myself, how to fight for things that I believed in,” Garth said of her late friend. “I also saw that she was saying what she needed to say, and I thought, ‘I want to be like that. I want to be a person that uses my voice and says what I need to say.’ So she did inspire me.”
