17 little-known facts about ‘Friends’ even fans might not know

“Friends” cocreator and executive producer Marta Kauffman explained to The Hollywood Reporter that a lot of aspects of the show changed as natural chemistry developed between cast members.

“You set out to do things, and then actors come in and they breathe life into it, and it’s not quite what you imagined it was going to be,” Kauffman said.

For instance, Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler (Matthew Perry) were only supposed to get together briefly before she was set to end up with Joey (Matthew LeBlanc). But when Monica and Chandler did get together on screen, viewers responded so enthusiastically to the pairing that the Joey and Monica plotline was discarded.

“We were stunned,” Kauffman said. “So that’s when we sort of went, ‘Huh, guess this is going in a different direction.'”

“Friends” director James Burrows had such a good feeling about the show’s success that he decided to take the cast to Las Vegas before the show premiered and their careers took off.

“I took them to Vegas,” Burrows told Us Weekly. “I had me and six of them and I said — I don’t know why I said this — I said, ‘This is your last shot at anonymity. Once the show comes on the air, you guys will never be able to go anywhere without being hounded.’ I knew the show had a chance to really take off.”

Kauffman spoke about working with Cox in a 1995 issue of The Los Angeles Times, noting the similarities Cox shared with her character, Monica.

“Let’s face it, she’s adorable and intelligent and really together. She is Monica,” Kauffman said.

“She has the neatest dressing room. She even cleans up the other actors’ dressing rooms because she won’t go in there if they are too messy,” she added. 

In a 2012 interview with Vanity Fair, cocreators Crane and Kauffman expressed their struggle to keep up with the network’s constantly changing rules.

“For a long time, we couldn’t show a condom wrapper,” Kauffman said.

“The rules kept changing,” Crane added. “For the first three years, we could say ‘penis.’ Then we couldn’t say ‘penis.’ Then we could say ‘penis’ again.”

Despite getting big names like Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, and Julia Roberts to guest-star on the show, Kauffman and Crane still regret the fact that they couldn’t find a way to fit Justin Timberlake into “Friends.” 

“We got a call that Justin Timberlake wanted to do the show,” Kauffman said. Crane said Timberlake was “lovely” to meet, but the two couldn’t think of a good part for him.

“My kids were furious,” Kauffman said. “They wanted to kill me.”

Warren Littlefield, the president of NBC from 1991 until 1998, said that the character of Ross was created specifically for Schwimmer.

“Marta and David early on were big fans of David Schwimmer and really wrote the character of Ross with Schwimmer in mind,” Littlefield told the Emmys in a now-deleted post.

But, Schwimmer almost skipped on reading for the part. 

“At the time, David was thinking, ‘You know what. I’m just going to go back and do theater.’ But his agent doggedly pursued him to read the script and come back from Chicago to read for the role,” he added.

“You were wearing an appropriate Phoebe Buffay — like a white linen, hippie shirt, and you had a bunch of seashells and necklaces on,” Aniston recalled to Kudrow in a 2020 Variety feature. “And you had your hair pulled up in two little clips, and you had these little blond tendrils.”

Kudrow said she was still trying to get into character even though she already had the role. 

Aniston said she also remembers Cox’s table-read outfit, “a pink baby tee with a white trim.”

On “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” when Phoebe sees Monica and Chandler undressing each other, Phoebe says, “My eyes! My eyes!” 

Kudrow actually asked for Perry’s permission before mimicking his character’s style with that line.  

“That’s how Matthew Perry said things. I actually asked his permission before we shot it,” the actor said in the Variety feature, speaking of that scene. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the rehearsals, but I’m saying ‘My eyes! My eyes!’ the way you do. So I just need to know that that’s OK with you. If not, I’ll say it a different way. And he was like, ‘Yeah, go for it.'”

Aniston added that she felt that “Matthew required us to ask permission when we borrowed Chandler’s cadence.”

Although rumors of a “Friends” reboot regularly swirl around the internet, Kauffman has frequently dispelled the idea of doing a continuation of the show she helped create.

“The show is about that time in your life when your friends are your family — that’s what the show was about,” Kauffman said.

She said she felt that once Monica and Chandler started their own family and left the apartment during the finale, the story had finally moved on beyond the characters.

This story was originally published on September 26, 2018, and most recently updated on September 27, 2024.

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