With production being halted on the highly-anticipated Friends reunion on HBO MAX, we're starving for some Friends.
After all, the sitcom ended decades ago, yet we're still obsessed with every single part of it: the laughs, the touching moments, the characters.
To help get you by until the reunion gets going again, here's some trivia about the characters that most superfans didn't even know!
He told The Telegraph:
"The whole arc of the relationship was weird then because for him to be able to move on enough to marry someone else and then go back to being in love with Rachel later just went a bit too far."
Rachel could have been mighty different!
Tea ended up turning down the role to do a show called The Naked Truth. Sadly, that was canceled after only three seasons.
Talk about regret!
Cox explained during an interview that “For some reason, I thought I related more to Monica, which maybe it’s because I do.”
How differently might the show have looked without Courteney as Monica?!
If you remember, this almost happened until Joey misread "lemonade" for being a code for you-know-what.
But, according to the show's co-creator, Marta Kauffman, this all changed when the studio audience reacted so positively to Chandler and Monica being intimate.
"So that’s when we sort of went, ‘Huh, guess this is going in a different direction," she said.
It's a good thing this happened since we all saw how big Joey would have gotten if he had married Monica!
Talk about commitment!
"I did it myself after a while, he told Buzzfeed.
"It was just easier instead of coming in early to do it. I would just do it the night before."
"I'd worked with the assistant director, Joel Wang, and he gave me the call. He said, 'Hey, do you want to come on and be in the background in a coffee shop? I would love you to just stand by the espresso machine and pretend like you're actually really working it, just so it would look authentic," he told Buzzfeed.
"No one really expected until after that first season that it was going to continue. And 10 years! Who would have thought?"
While he turned it down, we all know that he ended up on the show later on.
In Season 3, he played Monica's millionaire-boyfriend-turned-aspiring-UFC-fighter, Pete Becker.
Word has it that a friend gave it to her as a good luck present when she first started acting.
She clearly wasn't too big a fan of it, as she quickly lent it to the Friends set who kept it.
Talk about lending inspiration!
There was Ross (David Schwimmer) for Ross Chandler, Joey (Matt LeBlanc) for Joey Martin, Chandler (Matthew Perry) for the Chandler family, Monica (Courteney Cox) for Monique/Daisy Cortland, Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) for Janet Green, and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) for Phoebe Tyler Wallingford.
As it turns out, this bet was with his The Whole Nine Yards co-star, Matthew Perry.
It was even reported that he donated any money he got from the show to charity.
“I had a really, really hard time working with Aniston because I was so in love with her,” Cole Sprouse told the New York Post in 2017.
“I was infatuated. I was speechless—I’d get all bubbly and forget my lines and completely blank…It was so difficult.”
Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, told Vanity Fair:
“It felt wildly inappropriate. That’s how close we all were to the character. I was like, ‘That’s Rachel. She was supposed to be with Ross.'"
In the end, it was revealed that the writers had added this storyline in to delay Ross and Rachel getting back together in the end.
"It was sort of a rock star moment because there will never be another show where my every entrance is a secret and a surprise," Maggie Wheeler told Digital Spy.
“They would keep me hidden–I could barely come down to get a doughnut.”
"I had to stay in my dressing room until the last moment and then they’d secretly move me from behind the set to the right spot and they’d keep a black screen so the audience couldn’t see me until I made my first entrance."
If you ever dreamed of these two besties getting together, it was this close to happening.
“Toward the end, we actually pitched the idea that Joey and Phoebe had been having casual sex the entire time," Matt Leblanc told EW.
"We’d go back and shoot all the historical scenes and just before a moment that everyone recognizes, there’s Joey and Phoebe coming out of a broom closet together. But they were like, ‘Nah.’”
They were always each other's lobsters.
“We had [expletive] the audience around for 10 years with their ‘will they or won’t they,’ and we didn’t see any advantage in frustrating them," said co-creator, David Crane.
Kudrow has what's known as ornithophobia, a fear of birds.
If you pay close attention in those episodes you can literally see the fear in her eyes whenever she's in the same shot as the fiendish fowl.
“That’s the only job I ever auditioned for twice,” Azaria said in an interview with The Huffington Post.
“I thought it was so good — they had rejected me once — I said, ‘I’m going back, I’m gonna do it again, I’m gonna try it again.’”
"Oh. My. GOD!"
Was there ever a TV character as annoying as Janice? Has there been one since? As hard to believe as it might be, the accent is totally fake. Maggie Wheeler supposedly based the accent on people she knew.
I wonder if she's friends with Fran Drescher?
“Schwimmer had auditioned the year before for a pilot we were making, and he just stuck in our heads. That was an offer. No audition.”
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I always thought Ross was the funniest in the bunch!
Supposedly, Lisa Kudrow hated the idea of Phoebe playing the guitar.
It's a good thing though. Can you imagine what "Smelly Cat" would sound like on the bongos? Not good.
During a Reddit AMA, Lisa had this to say about her pregnancy:
"Here's what was difficult about having a child: when he visited the set, it was hard to be in character. Because i didn't want him to ever experience me as anything OTHER than his mother."
The live audience was apparently so sad that filming was put on hold. Everyone needed some time to process what they had just seen. Thankfully, Rachel's proposal never materialized afterward.
