Jennie Garth says Luke Perry was her ‘first true love’

Jennie Garth wasn’t just acting in her scenes with the late Luke Perry on Beverly Hills, 90210.

On the iconic teen drama, the duo starred as Kelly Taylor and Dylan McKay, whose on-again, off-again relationship became one of the series’ primary story lines. For Garth, she couldn’t help but be caught up in the onscreen romance.

“I do think he was my first true love,” Garth told PEOPLE. “Now looking back, I’m like, ‘You were just like every other girl in the world.’ Everyone imagined him as their first true love.”

Garth admitted that the lines often became “confusing” and “a little blurry at times” for her when it came to her costar.

“There were a lot of intimate conversations and moments between these two characters, and I think I got caught up in it and I allowed myself to think that it was real,” she shared. “I still believe that there was something real there. We had a very special relationship.”

Garth added that the confusion disappeared when she and Perry both got married during the show’s run, allowing them to just settle into being “great friends.”

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Perry died of a stroke in 2019, at the age of 52, just a few months before much of the original cast reunited for the meta reboot BH90210. The losses continued for the 90210 family in 2024 when Shannen Doherty died of cancer.

“It still doesn’t make sense to my brain,” Garth previously said of Perry and Doherty’s deaths. “I live in a world where they still are a lot in my mind. So it’s very, very hard to understand that they’re not here physically.”

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