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The One with Six Kids and a Fountain

On a summer night in 1994, six young actors boarded a private jet in Los Angeles and flew to Las Vegas for dinner. It was director James Burrows’s idea. The pilot episode of Friends had been shot and delivered, but not yet aired. NBC was so enthused about the first script that they’d already ordered a full season of episodes. Poor testing aside, Burrows had the unshakable feeling that they had a hit on their hands. On top of that, they had six overexcited pilot stars knocking around the Warner Bros. lot, unsure if their show would go anywhere, but nevertheless riding high on all the hype. Burrows called Les Moonves: “Give me the plane. I’d like to take the kids to Vegas.”¹¹

On the hour-long flight, Burrows showed the cast their episode, for the very first time. When they landed, he took them all to dinner at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s flagship restaurant and legendary ’90s celebrity hotspot. (“It was so fancy,” Jennifer Aniston recalled nearly twenty years later, grinning at the giddy memory.) The whole group was overwhelmed and dazzled, itching to go out and do whatever it was that hot young television actors were supposed to do when they flew into Vegas on private jets. Then, in the middle of dinner, Burrows held up his hands and said what he’d brought them here to say: “This is your last shot at anonymity.”

Burrows had agreed to stay on for a few more episodes, and would eventually direct the majority of Season One. But he’d already seen firsthand the audience response. “They loved these characters. They laughed at these characters. They were six young people who were handsome and pretty and funny.” This dinner, he told the cast, would be their last night out as ordinary people, their “last fling” with normality, before the swarming fans descended. Burrows looked around the table at six blank faces, and hit the point again, perhaps a little too hard: “From now on, your lives are over.”

They didn’t buy it. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow, oh, my God,’” remembered Lisa Kudrow. “I sat there going, ‘Well, we’ll see.’” Matt LeBlanc was incredulous, but then he remembered who he was talking to.

All due respect to Burrows, it was a fairly ridiculous prediction—optimistic, to say the least. Most new shows didn’t (still don’t) survive, and even the hits didn’t hit that hard. Complicating things further, his cast was in a tenuous position, with some of them committed to other series. If one of them had to drop out, they would lose that preternatural chemistry that so electrified studio audiences. In all likelihood, this “last shot” in Vegas would be their first and only taste of celebrity life. The cast accepted this “warning” with respect, but with a grain or two of salt, as well. So, Burrows—the man they’d come to nickname “Papa”—gave in, and asked if they wanted to go gamble.

By the following year, his prophecy would have come true and then some, with all the cast members earning six-figure fees for a single Diet Coke endorsement, on top of their growing per-episode salaries. But that night in Vegas, Burrows said, “They didn’t have a pot to piss in.” They each wrote Burrows checks for a couple hundred dollars and he gave them some cash to go hit the casinos. “We were having so much fun, I didn’t care what was happening,” recalled Aniston. They had jobs and they had some pocket money and no idea of what was to come. Aniston, at least, also had no idea how to gamble. “I barely understood what cards were.”

But that night she learned, and in the months to come, poker would become a mainstay on the Friends set. Burrows let the cast borrow his dressing room (the largest on set) so they could play during rehearsal or shooting breaks. This would eventually become the basis for the Season One episode, “The One with All the Poker.”¹² But that night in Las Vegas, it was Burrows’s way of bonding the cast off-screen—almost corralling them into real-life friendships. He knew—everyone knew—from the first read-through, that they clicked as actors. But chemistry would only go so far. If, and hopefully when, the show took off, he knew they’d have to like and support each other, as colleagues and collaborators. No one had successfully launched a comedy ensemble of this size. Burrows understood that if his ensemble was going to pull it off, they’d have to step into the spotlight as a team.

David Schwimmer was the first to be recruited. He was the only one, in fact, for whom a character had been written specifically, and the only one who was offered his role sight unseen. He said no.

Schwimmer was born in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York, in 1966, but moved with his parents (both lawyers) and older sister, Ellie, to Los Angeles at the age of two. From the start, he recognized himself as an outsider in this industry town, a feeling he would never shake, even when he became one of the most successful and recognizable people in it.

At Beverly Hills High School (the legendary high school that would become fodder for numerous film and television series, including Beverly Hills, 90210), Schwimmer was both a nerdy, metal-mouthed outcast and a bully, by his own admission. He joined the drama club, where he found his friends (including actor Jonathan Silverman, who would become the breakout star of Weekend at Bernie’s) as well as a passion for theater. One night, his parents took him to see Ian McKellen’s one-man show, Acting Shakespeare, and upon leaving the theater, Schwimmer knew without question that he wanted to be an actor himself. “I watched this guy without any props, or makeup, or changes of clothing, or anything—I watched him simply sit in a chair and stand occasionally, and transform into about twelve different lead characters from the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays. And I couldn’t believe it, it was like a magic trick,” he said. “I think that was the moment for me, really.”

But outside of that one extracurricular, he was miserable and itching to leave. His was a family of bone-deep New Yorkers, and while his parents’ careers flourished in Hollywood (his mother famously handled Roseanne Barr’s first divorce), they never let their children forget that there was a much bigger world outside the sunny bubble of LA. Arthur Schwimmer and Arlene Colman-Schwimmer were fun parents but not lax ones; Schwimmer later remembered his childhood household as one full of laughter and after-dinner card games, but also a constant focus on academic achievement. His mother, in particular, imbued in David a social conscience, particularly when it came to issues of gender equality¹³—an ethos that would later emerge at a pivotal point during Friends production.

But back then, Schwimmer was a theater kid, not an aspiring TV star. He loved his close-knit family, but not his hometown. “When I was there I always felt: this is not me. I’m surrounded by people with a different value system. And I just wanted to get out of California.” When he was a senior, producers from the hit Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Brighton Beach Memoirs came to LA to audition replacements for the show. The Beverly Hills High drama teacher submitted both Schwimmer and his friend Silverman for the lead role of Eugene Jerome, originated by Matthew Broderick. But Schwimmer’s parents soon intervened. They were die-hard theater fans themselves, and supportive of their son’s ambitions—but not at the cost of higher education. “No, you’re not going to Broadway,” they told him. “You’re going to school.”

Silverman won the part, and Schwimmer went off to Northwestern University. Despite his initial disappointment, Schwimmer’s college experience became one of—if not the—most crucial points in his life as an actor. Just like Marta Kauffman and David Crane, Schwimmer made his closest friends and theatrical collaborators in college, and with them he founded the Lookingglass Theatre Company, shortly before graduating in 1988. Thirty years later, the nonprofit ensemble company continues to mount productions, often with Schwimmer at the helm as director or producer. From those early days, Schwimmer’s passion for American social-justice causes transferred to the stage, where he explored contemporary plays about race and economic inequality, alongside classics like The Odyssey and Our Town. The Chicago theater scene as we know it today was young (Steppenwolf, the influential theater company, having only been founded about a decade prior), but it was growing fast. Moments away from graduating one of the country’s most respected acting programs, Schwimmer found himself on the swell of a thrilling new wave of American theater. And, at last, he’d found a community of which he felt a part, blissfully removed from Hollywood in every sense of the word.

Then came the senior showcase, the traditional conclusion to every college theater program. As usual, a handful of agents and managers flew in from New York and Los Angeles to watch the graduating students perform and keep an eye out for fresh talent. Schwimmer performed a selection from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, after which one of the LA-based managers approached and gave him the I’m-gonna-make-you-a-star speech. In the grand tradition of earnest and perhaps slightly self-serious college theater majors, Schwimmer rebuffed the idea of movie stardom. For the most part. The manager pressed, assuring Schwimmer that if he just came back to LA, he’d be cast in a heartbeat, make buckets of money, no problem. “Mind you, I was incredibly naive, and I believed her when she said I would make a very good living, very quickly,” Schwimmer said. It is hard to imagine any twenty-two-year-old—even one who’d spent senior year securing 501(c)(3) status for his nonprofit theater company—not being drawn to the dazzling promise of instant, enormous fame. In the end, though, Schwimmer says he did it for the money. He had a plan.

As Schwimmer explained to his theater company, he would go to LA with this manager, make a quick million dollars, and bring it back to Chicago so they could use it to build their own theater. It would take, like, six months—maybe eight. “This is how naive—and also full of myself—I was,” Schwimmer recalled decades later. Back then, he and his classmates were the big fish in a small but prestigious pond. Again, as Kauffman and Crane had done just a few years earlier, Schwimmer took a sabbatical from the theater world—certain it would be a brief and lucrative one.

It was neither. In the end, only the manager turned out to be temporary. In those first eight months, Schwimmer did get a role in a television movie, as well as an agent, Leslie Siebert (who is now a senior managing partner at the Gersh Agency, and still reps Schwimmer today). But nothing else. Discouraged and humbled, Schwimmer went back to Chicago and joined his company at Lookingglass.

For years, Schwimmer hopped between Chicago and Los Angeles, where he’d pick up the occasional bit part on shows like NYPD Blue and Blossom. Mostly, though, he waited tables for half a decade. “I worked at nearly every Daily Grill in Los Angeles,” he said. His first real break was a small four-episode role on The Wonder Years. The night the first episode aired, Schwimmer was working the dinner shift at a Daily Grill on La Cienega Boulevard, which had a TV behind the bar. “Hey, Schwimmer, you’re on TV!” called his friend working the bar, and Schwimmer spent the next half hour giddily sneaking glimpses at the show while bouncing back and forth between dinner-rush diners. “So, I’m waiting tables and catching myself on TV for the first time. And then back to, ‘Hey, do you want blue cheese or Thousand Island?’”

Then, in 1993, Schwimmer once again found himself up against his high-school friend Jonathan Silverman, when both were called to audition for the same part on a new pilot. The show was Kauffman and Crane’s ill-fated Couples, and again, Silverman got the part. But Kauffman and Crane loved Schwimmer’s audition, and when Couples fizzled and they began sketching out characters for the Insomnia Café pitch, it was his performance that inspired the character of Ross. “David had this wonderful hangdog vulnerability,” recalled Kauffman. “And he just stuck in our minds.”

In the meantime, Schwimmer had landed a role on Monty, a new Fox sitcom starring Henry Winkler, about a conservative, Rush Limbaugh–esque radio host and his left-wing liberal family. It was, without question, the biggest job he’d ever gotten. He was a series regular with a five-year contract, and money in the bank for the first time. And it was a nightmare. “As beautiful a guy as Henry Winkler was, the experience wasn’t very empowering for me,” Schwimmer later explained. “I’m a very collaborative person, and if you’re going to work with me as an actor then I want to bring something to it.” He’d try to throw out ideas and discuss with the writers, but nobody wanted to hear it from an actor (maybe Winkler, but not this kid). Naively, he’d expected television would be like ensemble theater, with everyone pitching in creatively and working as a team. Instead, he was just an actor working alongside—not with—everyone else. They shot thirteen episodes, but to Schwimmer’s great relief, Monty was canceled after the first six aired. The LA experiment was over. Schwimmer went straight back to Chicago, telling his agent not to send him anything, and certainly no more TV jobs. After Monty, he was done. The Lookingglass company mounted an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Stalin-era novel, The Master and Margarita, at Steppenwolf, with Schwimmer in the role of Pontius Pilate. Having gotten as far away from network television as possible, Schwimmer got a call from Siebert. Yes, she knew he didn’t want to do any more sitcoms, but there was this new script he just had to read.

No.

But these were the writers from that great pilot Couples. And they wrote this part for him.

Incredibly flattering, but no. Thank you.

And it’s an ensemble.

At this, Schwimmer paused. His only real priority was working with a true ensemble. Knowing that, and the fact that this part had been written just for him, it seemed absurd and disrespectful not to at least consider it. He agreed to read the script, but nothing more. Kauffman and Crane were friends with Robby Benson, an actor/director¹⁴ who Schwimmer greatly admired. The writers asked Benson to give Schwimmer a call and see what he might do to persuade him to come back and meet with them—just a meeting! It wasn’t as if this show would actually go anywhere. It was just a pilot, come on! Still, he hedged a bit. Finally, they brought in the biggest gun possible, and asked Burrows to call. Schwimmer got on the plane.

Matthew Perry was broke. While Schwimmer was being wooed via telephone, hemming and hawing over the role that had been tailor-made for him, Matthew Perry was frantically calling his agents, begging them to get him a gig. Didn’t matter what kind of gig as long as it was shooting now. His business manager had just called to inform him that he had no money. No, he wasn’t running low on money—he was out. He needed a job, ideally today.

At twenty-three, Perry had been a working actor for almost ten years. Though born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was raised in Ottawa, Ontario, primarily by his mother, Suzanne Langford, a journalist and one-time press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Perry attended the same grade school as the PM’s son, and future Canadian leader/beloved political dreamboat, Justin Trudeau. (In 2017, Perry famously confessed on a late-night talk show that in fifth grade, he and his friend Chris Murray beat up Trudeau because they were jealous of his athletic ability.¹⁵) His mother later married journalist Keith Morrison (best known to Americans as a longtime correspondent on Dateline NBC). As for his father, Perry said, he mostly saw him on TV.

While Perry spent most of his youth in a community far removed from show business, his father was one of the most recognizable faces on television at the time. John Bennett Perry was the iconic “Old Spice Man,” appearing in ads throughout the 1970s and ’80s. He notched small roles in numerous films and television episodes of the era, as well, but to this day he remains famous as the dashing but rugged symbol of commercial masculinity. At fifteen, Perry went to live with his father, and was none too thrilled to find himself the son of a sex symbol. “I would never bring a girl home, because all the girls would just go, ‘Who’s that guy?’ ‘That’s my dad. I know. When you guys are done, I’ll be in therapy.’”

Perry had moved to the States to further his tennis career. In Canada, he’d become a nationally ranked player among boys under fourteen. When he got to LA, however, he discovered that being one of the best tennis players in Ottawa was about as impressive as being one of the top-ranked ice hockey players in Southern California. He was a natural athlete, but simply couldn’t compete, so he shifted his focus on his second favorite extracurricular activity: acting. It was a natural move for an LA teenager, especially one with built-in connections. And as he himself would readily acknowledge, Perry was always a performer, a competitive or even desperate seeker of the spotlight. “I was a guy who wanted to become famous,” he told the New York Times in 2002. “There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly.”

With his father’s agent representing him, Perry booked one-off roles here and there, on shows like Charles in Charge and Silver Spoons. In 1987, he landed the lead in a long-forgotten Second Chance, a Fox comedy about a man who dies in a hovercraft accident in 2011,¹⁶ meets Saint Peter, is deemed not bad enough for hell but not good enough for heaven, and so instead is sent back to earth in the 1980s in order to help his teenage self make better decisions. How’s that for a log line? The show was briefly pulled off the air after poor ratings (astonishing, I know!), retooled slightly, and brought back under the title Boys Will Be Boys. The new version still didn’t work, and today, the show is best known simply for featuring one of Matthew Perry’s first lead roles.¹⁷

After that, Perry continued to bounce between guest spots, appearing once or twice on dozens of the most popular series of the 1980s and ’90s, including one episode of Dream On, where he met Kauffman, Bright, and Crane. He wasn’t famous but he was visible and busy and making a decent living. At least he thought he was, until his phone rang one day and he found out he was broke.

But at least he was broke during pilot season. Shortly after calling his agents, Perry got an offer to do the pilot of yet another Fox sitcom with a premise that sounds more like an ill-advised audience prompt at an improv comedy show. LAX 2194 was about airport baggage handlers working at Los Angeles International Airport, in the year 2194. “I was the head baggage handler,” Perry recalled. “And my job, in the show, was to sort out aliens’ luggage.” Ryan Stiles and Kelly Hu costarred as futuristic US customs agents,¹⁸ and for reasons I cannot begin to imagine, the producers decided to cast little people as the aliens.

Despite the bright red flags, Perry said yes to the role. He had to. Sure, it might complicate things in the long term; if the pilot turned into a series, then Perry would be locked into playing a twenty-second-century baggage handler. But that seemed extremely improbable to everyone except, presumably, the network executives who’d greenlit the pilot. LAX 2194 would keep Perry out of the running for other roles, but only for one pilot season. What he didn’t know was that, over on the Warner Bros. lot, his name was on a list of actors to be brought in for another show. And it was close to the top.

Perry did know about the pilot itself, though—everyone did. “It was the script that everybody was talking about,” he recalled. He knew, too, that he was perfect for it. All his friends were being brought in to read for it, and Perry kept getting calls from them saying, “There’s this guy on this show that is you.” The role of Chandler Bing wasn’t written for Perry, the way Ross had been for Schwimmer, but it might as well have been, so close was the resemblance. Chandler was a mix of silliness and bone-dry sarcasm, a mask over his insecurity, which slipped just often enough to let you see the genuine, sweet guy beneath (in desperate need of therapy). Yeah, Perry thought, that sounded familiar.

Kauffman, Crane, and Bright felt the same way about Perry. Too bad he was already on that alien airport show, or whatever it was. Perry would have been perfect, but they didn’t want to bring on any cast members in second position. “Second position” casting is a common but extremely awkward scenario in the television business: an actor who’s already working on one pilot or series gets cast in another pilot—with the assumption that the show they’re already working on will get canned, freeing them up for the new gig. On the other hand, if the actor’s first-position show isn’t canceled, then they’re stuck with it, and their second-position show has to be recast and reshot. It’s a necessary evil in an industry where projects fail far more often than succeed, but still, no one wants to cast their pilot with someone they have second dibs on.

Anyway, Kauffman and Crane thought, Chandler would be one of the easiest roles to cast. So much of the character’s humor was already built in; he had jokes, and lots of dialogue an actor could work with. But after three weeks and countless auditions, they still hadn’t found him. Perry himself had coached several candidates, many of whom were his friends. He even tried to teach them some of those specific mannerisms and speech patterns that became so iconic to the role. Could it be any more obvious?¹⁹

Also obvious, to Perry at least, was the fact that LAX 2194 was not a winner. Particularly not during this pilot season, which was packed with an unprecedented number of hits-to-be—ER, Party of Five, Chicago Hope, Touched by an Angel—and future beloved cult hits like My So-Called Life and The Critic. He called his agents constantly, begging them to book him a Friends audition. Yes, he’d be in second position, but surely he was a safe second.²⁰

Meanwhile, the Friends creators were on their third week of Chandler readings. While no one fit the bill exactly, actor Craig Bierko came the closest. He was a good friend of Perry’s, and had been well-coached by him. Bierko had also been on The Powers That Be (the disastrous show Kauffman and Crane had created for Norman Lear), and they knew him to be a great actor and a good guy. He wasn’t a perfect fit, and some at the network thought he was downright wrong, but after nearly a month of auditioning every other available actor, it was time to move on. They offered Bierko the part and sent him the script. He declined.

Bierko has since gone on to have a successful career of his own, and while he will always be known as The One Who Turned Down Friends, he readily acknowledges that he only got the offer by doing a very good Matthew Perry impression. He had the chance to take the starring role in another pilot, which simply seemed like a better opportunity than being one of six in an ensemble. With the second-best Chandler out of the picture, Perry was finally able to nag his way into the room. His agents called to tell him he had an audition, and when Perry hung up the phone, a feeling came over him. “I instantly knew my whole life was going to change—which has never happened before or since then. I knew I was going to get it. I knew it was going to be huge. I just knew.”

Perry read for Kauffman on Wednesday, then Warner Bros. on Thursday, and once more, for NBC, on Friday. But as Kauffman remembered, it was a done deal from the first line: “He came in, and that was it.” Second position or not, he was worth the gamble. On Monday morning, Matthew Perry came to work. He was Chandler Bing.

Phoebe Buffay should have been a casting nightmare. She was a trapezoidal peg in a round hole. The character’s over-the-top bohemian vibe, combined with a backstory of hideous trauma, set her so far apart from the rest of the group that her presence itself begged the constant question: Why is she here? It should have taken months to find an actress who could juggle all of Phoebe’s oddities, maintain her level of woo-woo while remaining tethered to reality, and manage to convince an audience that she had a deep connection to these people with whom she had nothing at all in common. Then Lisa Kudrow walked in and just did it. Done.

During Friends’ heyday, much to-do would be made in the media over Kudrow’s prowess at playing ditzes despite the fact that, in reality, she’s an intelligent, highly educated woman. In later years, when Kudrow launched another successful career as a writer and producer (and actor), the narrative flipped. Turns out Phoebe’s actually smart! In both eras, Kudrow succeeded, in large part, due to one very wise decision: she didn’t listen to any of that. She just showed up and did her job.

By her own admission, Kudrow was a markedly serious young woman—so much so that her parents were concerned she’d never have a social or romantic life. She grew up in LA, but, like David Schwimmer, was raised in a family with no interest in Hollywood, and certainly not celebrity culture. She describes her mother, Nedra, a travel agent, as “the classiest lady that I’d ever encountered.” Nedra was reserved and refused to gossip, qualities that Kudrow always aspired to. On the other hand, her father was a talker. He had a performative nature, which he passed on to his children, of which Lisa was the youngest. Dr. Lee N. Kudrow was a renowned physician and researcher, specializing in headache medicine. From an early age, Kudrow intended to follow his example and go into medicine herself—not just because she greatly admired her father’s work, but because it seemed respectable.

At an even earlier age, Kudrow had wanted to be an actress. In nursery school she’d memorized and recited Alice in Wonderland to her family, and through her adolescence she did school plays and summer theater programs. But in high school, things changed. “That’s when I started thinking, ‘What kind of adult am I going to be?’” She loved performing, but the idea of calling herself an actress didn’t sit right. She had the (not entirely wrong) idea that actors were looked down upon, in the wider world, and perhaps she looked down on them, too. Plus, she had other interests. Kudrow was an excellent student, particularly adept at biology. She would become a doctor, she decided. “I thought, ‘Yeah that’s good. That’s the kind of mom I think your kids will be proud of.’”

Not many people enter high school considering the respect of their future children, but that’s the kind of teenager Kudrow was. She stuck to the plan through college. After graduating from Vassar with a BSc in biology, she went to work with her father on a study of hemispheric dominance and headache types,²¹ hoping that having her name on a published paper would be helpful in applying to graduate school.

But something changed that summer. She’d be driving around, listening to the radio, and an ad for some new sitcom would come on, reminding listeners to tune in that night. They’d play a clip of dialogue from the show—some joke with a big punch line, followed by a wave of laugh track. “This thought would pop into my head: ‘God, punching that joke so hard. Just throw it away. Lisa, remember to throw it away—it’ll be funnier.’” What? Where did that come from? It was spooky, but she couldn’t stop it. All of a sudden, Kudrow had this bossy little acting coach in her head. Every time she watched a TV show or heard an ad on the radio, it would pipe up: “Okay, remember to do it this way when you do it.”

Kudrow pushed back against herself. Remember your kids? You’re not going to be an actor. “I just kept trying to shove that away,” she recalled. Then one more voice chimed in, suggesting she give it a shot. This time, she listened—because that voice belonged to Jon Lovitz. Lovitz had been her older brother’s best friend since childhood, and she’d seen up close how long and hard he’d struggled to break into show business. But that summer, Lovitz was cast on Saturday Night Live. “And I realized, oh, my God. So this is something that actually can work out. For real people.” Maybe even people with kids.

Lovitz urged Kudrow to check out LA’s legendary improv comedy school, The Groundlings. Just take a class and see what happened—no harm in that, right? Right, Kudrow thought. She was twenty-two years old. She didn’t yet have children to raise or a mortgage to pay, or any of those looming adult responsibilities she’d been preparing for since ninth grade. This was the time to take risks. If not now, when?

Nervously, she approached her parents with the news. “Fantastic,” they said. “When do you start?” She was surprised at the time, but on reflection, Kudrow suspected they were worried about her. Of course they were proud of how hard she’d worked and how career-focused she was, but there was more to life than mortgages and hemispheric dominance. Like, say, dating. She needed something to help her lighten up. Improv classes? “Thank God, yes, go. Right now. We’ll drive you.”

That was it for biomedical research. Kudrow went from taking classes at The Groundlings to teaching them part-time. Still, it took a while to step out of her comfort zone, even as she began to build a roster of characters. The first one she ever performed was a biology professor. “I started with what I knew,” she recalled. And then she pretty much continued as such, creating a host of very smart, very serious academic types, whose humor lay in the fact that they didn’t realize how boring they were. Kudrow was great at playing these roles and, ever the A-student, she stayed in her lane—until the day her teacher, Tracy Newman,²² nudged her out of it. “We’ve never seen a dumb character from you,” she told Kudrow. “We need to see an airhead. Just go for it.”

She quickly whipped up something based on girls she’d known in high school, and soon discovered she could play dumb as well as smart. One airhead led to another, and she wound up getting cast in her first play, Ladies’ Room, written by Robin Schiff (another Groundling), for which she created the character Michele. She had about five minutes of stage time in Ladies’ Room, but Michele would later reemerge as one of Kudrow’s most beloved film roles, in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (also written by Schiff).

Kudrow kept a day job, doing administrative work in her fa ther’s office, while she began to pick up more auditions here and there. The Groundlings gave her a degree of visibility, but she was never touted as one of the group’s superstars (or else she didn’t see herself as such). Still, as she landed her first, small television gigs, Kudrow began to form a new career goal: she wanted to be on a sitcom.

Almost immediately, the dream came true. In 1993, Kudrow got a principal role in one of the hottest new pilots of the year—one that had all the elements working in its favor: it was the spin-off of an incredibly popular sitcom, it featured an established TV star, and Burrows was attached to direct. Lisa Kudrow had won the part of Roz on Frasier. Four days into production, she was fired.

“They originally wanted Peri Gilpin,” Kudrow would later explain of the Frasier debacle. The part of Roz had actually been written for her, though Kudrow didn’t yet know that. And thanks to her training, Kudrow had gotten very good at auditioning—sometimes to her detriment. She could nail a scene in the room, even if she knew in the back of her mind that she wasn’t right for the role, and would never be able to sustain the performance long-term. Unfortunately, she learned that lesson on Frasier. Kudrow tanked the first table-read. “Then at the rehearsals Jimmy would say, ‘It’s not working, don’t worry about it, don’t even try.’” She was sure Burrows hated her, that everyone hated her. The chemistry just didn’t work, and as production fumbled forward, Kudrow felt all eyes on her. Whatever magic she’d had in the audition room, it was long gone. Kudrow was quickly fired (and nicely fired, she insisted) and replaced by Gilpin.

Maybe it was a sign, Kudrow thought. She’d gotten her big shot and blown it so tremendously, so publicly. This whole city—this whole planet—was full of people who wanted to make it, and never would. Maybe you’re one of those people, she thought. Maybe you’re just not meant to do it. Her old friend and director, Robin Schiff, tried to pep her up, giving her the classic when-one-door-closes-a-window-opens talk. The city was also full of scripts in development and shows in production, windows aplenty. Kudrow waved off the platitude. Then she got another call, from actor Richard Kind—who gave her the opposite of a pep talk: “I heard what happened and I can’t believe it… How [do] you get out of bed every morning, get dressed, walk out the door, and show yourself in public? I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

It was so melodramatic that Kudrow snapped out of it. She’d lost a TV show, not a lung. She would survive this and, in fact, she was doing okay. Every day, she did go out in public, taking morning walks to the pastry shop, Michel Richard, where she’d treat herself to a pain au chocolat and a coffee, and then stroll around the neighborhood. Her brown hair began to lighten in the sun, and something about it made her feel better. She went to a colorist, asking her to match the new golden highlights in her hair, and over the course of six months, as she muddled through the post-Frasier funk, Kudrow became a full-blown blonde. “It literally lightened me up,” she said. It was an internal shift as much as a physical one, and with one door firmly closed and behind her, she was on the lookout for her next big window.

Any window, really—didn’t have to be a big one. Kudrow was in better emotional shape but financially not so much. She began looking around for another day job when her agent called one morning. Danny Jacobson, the cocreator and executive producer of Mad About You, wanted her for a waitress role. (Kudrow had previously appeared in a Season One flashback episode, and though it was a tiny part, she’d made a strong impression.) It was a last-minute thing, and the nameless character had just a couple lines of dialogue, so she wouldn’t have to audition or anything, but she’d get a guest-star credit. “I don’t think you should do it,” Kudrow’s agent told her. It was disrespectful, calling her in for a no-name role without even sending her sides to read, and anyway, “you’d have to be there, like, in an hour.” Kudrow jumped in the car.

The no-name waitress was a hit, and by the end of the week, Jacobson asked if she might be available for a few more episodes. Soon, she had a name—Ursula—and even a small fan base. Sometimes people on the street recognized Kudrow as the clueless waitress from Mad About You, and TV Guide gave her a “cheers” in the Cheers & Jeers section. That alone felt like a watershed moment to Kudrow. She was back! It was happening! If nothing else happened, she would always know that she had been a popular, recurring (not regular, but whatever) character on what everyone agreed was the best comedy on network television. If this was the top, great. And it probably would be, so she’d better do her damnedest not to screw this up.

Pilot season came around again, and like everyone else, Kudrow heard the chatter about this hot new script about a group of friends who hung out in a coffee shop. Jeffrey Klarik was a writer on Mad About You, as well as David Crane’s boyfriend. Kudrow didn’t know that at the time, but later she’d speculate that Klarik was the reason she wound up getting called in for Phoebe, and went straight to the producers to read. As Kauffman recalled, when Kudrow began to speak, it was in Phoebe’s voice, just as they had written it. “It was exactly what we heard.”

Next, she was sent to read for Burrows—and Kudrow knew it was over. He hated her, she was sure. During the disastrous Frasier pilot, it was Burrows who’d first recognized that she was the disaster. So, fine, this would be the end of the line for Friends, but who cared? She still had Mad About You. Knowing she had nothing to lose, Kudrow breezed through the audition for Burrows, who nodded and dismissed her, saying only, “No notes.” In truth, Burrows had no notes because, like everyone else, he saw immediately that Kudrow was Phoebe. The only problem was that she was Ursula, too.

It wouldn’t be unheard of for a series-regular actress to occasionally pop up in a recurring role on another show. But Mad About You and Friends were on the same network, the same night, and scheduled back-to-back at 8:00 p.m. and 8:30. And, of course, they were both set in Manhattan. It just wouldn’t work to have the waitress from Riff’s zipping downtown every night to live her double life as a West Village massage therapist. Thus, Phoebe became a twin.²³ Kauffman and Crane came up with the idea, and ran it by Danny Jacobson, who—to everyone’s surprise—said sure, no problem. “I don’t know that we would have said yes to that,” Crane recalled. Again, it didn’t hurt that Klarik was there to help mediate. And Mad About You was a rock-solid hit. Friends was just a promising newbie that was lucky enough to be riding into Thursday night, cushioned cozily between one popular comedy and one spectacularly popular comedy.

Courteney Cox had just done a stint on the latter, playing Jerry’s girlfriend, Meryl, on one episode of Seinfeld.²⁴ The show was in its fifth season and had never been bigger. That year, it took an astonishing leap from #25 in the Nielsen ratings to #3, and gained almost 10 million new viewers. Cox had played roles on other series before—some of them popular. But Seinfeld was a whole new ball game. This show had discarded the so-called rules of television comedy, delivering weird, niche storylines using pitch-black humor and a cast of caustic characters, but it was just so damn good. Still, good quality doesn’t always translate to good numbers, nor longevity. The real miracle of Seinfeld—a show “about nothing,” which should have appealed to no one—was that it had all three. But how? Everyone was trying to pinpoint it, that magic Seinfeld formula. After a few days on the set, Cox had discovered at least one absolutely crucial ingredient. She would bring it with her to her next job, and there, too, it would change everything.

Cox was called in early on during the Friends casting process. She was nowhere near as famous as she’d soon become, but she was an established television actress, and much more recognizable than any of her future costars. She’d been working since her late teens, first dabbling in modeling in Manhattan, the summer after graduating from high school. Cox grew up in Mountain Brook, Alabama, but had family connections in New York, thanks to her stepfather, Hunter Copeland. His nephews were drummer Stewart Copeland (of The Police), and music promoter/booking agent Ian Copeland, whom Cox would later briefly date. Cox returned to New York after her freshman year at Mount Vernon College, where she’d been studying architecture. She took a summer job as a receptionist in Ian’s office, and continued to pick up modeling gigs²⁵ and go out on a few commercial auditions. It wasn’t much, but to a nineteen-year-old, it was a more than enough to convince her that this was the place to be. “I just thought, I can always go to college,” Cox recalled, adding that she did sometimes regret not going back later. None of the Friends cast truly “stumbled” into acting, but Cox was perhaps the least likely star, if only because of her practical nature. In many ways, she was a less extreme version of Monica: sharply focused, no nonsense, and even puritanical.

But she was also young, and just as Kudrow had, Cox realized that if there was any time to give this business a shot, it was now. Furthermore, she was getting jobs, she’d been signed to Ford Models, and her nebulous career was picking up speed. Maybe this was the practical choice, at least for the moment, Cox said to herself. “I just thought, I’ll take this ride.”

Cox began taking acting courses and speech classes, to get rid of her Alabama accent. She got a two-day job playing a debutante named Bunny on As the World Turns, and a commercial for New York Telephone. Then one day she was sent out on what she thought was a commercial audition, and wound up in a room with Brian De Palma.

The audition turned out to be for a music video—the one that would make Courteney Cox a famous face (if not yet a famous name). She was cast in the video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” where she played a fan who gets pulled out of a concert crowd to dance on stage with The Boss himself. It was her third job.

It’s hard to overstate the cultural relevance of music videos and MTV in the mid-1980s, but suffice it to say that Cox could hardly have landed a bigger big break. The video was everywhere, and so was she. It was almost as if Bruce Springsteen had plucked her out of obscurity and made her a star. From then on, she booked a steady stream of TV gigs, doing guest spots as well as commercials. In 1985, she landed a Tampax ad, in which she famously became the first person ever to say the word period on national television. That, too, got Cox a heap of press, as well as fan mail from women’s advocacy groups who lauded her for daring to mention the menstrual cycle in such straightforward terms. Cox didn’t think it was such a big deal (and, frankly, wasn’t that thrilled to be known as The Girl Who Said Period) but hey, it was work.

Despite those first few hits, Cox spent much of the next decade living on guest spots, tiny film roles, and the occasional pilot. She starred as a telekinetic teenager in the sci-fi drama Misfits of Science, which was canceled during its first season, but gave her just enough financial cushioning to keep going. She landed the recurring part of Alex P. Keaton’s girlfriend during the last two seasons of Family Ties, followed by another starring role on an ill-fated CBS comedy called The Trouble with Larry.²⁶ Then, in 1994, a full decade after the Springsteen video, Cox got another big break. Three, in fact.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective premiered in February, to dismal reviews and massive box-office success. Cox played the female lead and love interest, and now her face was everywhere again, if only because it was next to Jim Carrey’s. The following month, her Seinfeld episode aired. Then her agents called with more big news. The producers from that hot new pilot everyone was talking about wanted her to come in. They had a role for her, and it was great: a cute, funny, slightly spoiled girl from Long Island who ditches her fiancé at the altar and comes to New York to make it on her own.

Yes, Kauffman admitted, “originally, we wanted her to do Rachel.” They hadn’t even considered Cox for Monica. Kauffman and Crane had written that role imagining a voice like Janeane Garofalo’s. Their Monica was tough and defensive—with plenty of heart underneath, of course, but guarded by a hard demeanor and a sharp tongue. Cox had such warmth about her, such a nurturing and almost maternal presence. She just wasn’t Monica.

Cox insisted she was. She got her, this organized, self-reliant woman who kept herself and everyone else in line. She didn’t know yet that Monica had a hypercompetitive streak and a tendency to obsess. Neither did the writers, at that point. Like all the characters, Monica would be shaped by Cox’s performance—her particular talent for playing the hard-ass with a heart of gold, and the full-body commitment with which she threw herself (sometimes literally) into physical comedy. In time, these things would add even more color to the character, creating her drive and high-grade neurosis. But when Cox first read the pilot, all she knew was that she clicked with Monica—in a way that didn’t often happen with sitcom characters. Monica wasn’t an archetype, but a mix of traits and quirks that Cox herself could relate to. She knew this woman, and she liked her.

“She said, ‘No, I’m Monica,’ and she was right,” recalled Kevin Bright. “Trust the actor.” Cox came in to read and hit it out of the park, balancing all of Monica’s sharp edges with a warm, welcoming humor and revealing her complexity, rather than walling it off behind sarcasm. She brought a high-energy vibe to the role that hadn’t been there before, and would soon become Monica’s defining characteristic. She nailed it, and she knew it.

“I remember thinking the role was mine,” recalled Cox.²⁷ She still had to read for the studio and the network, but it was a done deal. Then, on her way in to read for Warner Bros., she stopped in the ladies’ room, where she overheard someone talking in the next stall. Cox froze.

While she’d given a fantastic audition, there was one other actress who also seemed right for Monica. Nancy McKeon, who’d played Jo on the long-running series The Facts of Life, was called in for a reading, and everyone agreed she’d given a great one. On top of that, she had a fan base, having starred in one of the biggest sitcoms of the 1980s. Cox was excellent, and somewhat known, but it might be nice to have a real TV star in the mix. Opinions were split fifty-fifty, so Littlefield left it to Kauffman and Crane. The two of them went for a walk and talked it out. Friends was supposed to be a true ensemble. No lead characters and no star actors. Both Cox and McKeon were wonderful Monicas on their own, but who would be best for the team? They decided to bet on Cox.

There’s no way to know what kind of show Friends would have been had McKeon won the part. But Cox brought something more than her performance to the set—that crucial lesson she’d learned on Seinfeld. Three days into shooting the pilot, she huddled up her castmates and laid it out: if they wanted Friends to be even a tenth as successful as that show, they had to become a unit. The title had changed, but they were still six of one.

“Courteney had said, ‘Look, I did a guest star on Seinfeld,’” Lisa Kudrow recalled, “‘one of the reasons I think that show’s so great is that they all help each other out.’” She explained how, on that set, the actors would give each other suggestions and take one another’s notes without offense. Cox urged them to do the same. “If you’ve got something that you think is funny for me to do, I’m gonna do it. We’ve got to all help each other.” And, as she reminded them, this show wasn’t called Ross or Monica. There was no titular star here—no one who would get all the praise if it hit, or take all the heat if it failed. They had to carry this thing together.

“Normally, there’s a code with actors,” Kudrow explained. “We don’t give each other notes under any circumstances, and we don’t comment on each other’s performances.” It was almost taboo, what Cox was suggesting, but she knew if they could all agree to it, then it would make them infinitely better as a cast. And since she was the most famous one among them, it was on her to offer that permission. Given her status, Cox could have done the opposite, behaving like the lead and letting the others settle into supporting roles around her. Instead, she used her clout to cement them as a team. Kudrow recalled: “She was the one who set that tone and made us a real group.”

Matt LeBlanc was nervous, even so. Looking at this cast of characters, he knew there was at least one who could be kicked out of the group, and it was him. Phoebe was a weirdo, sure—but Joey was a letch. The original character breakdown described him as a “handsome, smug, macho guy in his twenties.” His interests included “women, sports, women, New York, women” and himself. On paper, it might seem funny to have this egotistical creep juxtaposed with two sensitive beta males and three women, but how many times could Joey leer at his female counterparts and make crude jokes before everyone turned on this sleazeball?

It wasn’t just Joey at issue, either. LeBlanc was greener than his castmates, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed during his first audition. “He wasn’t quite as experienced, it felt, as some of the other actors,” Kauffman remembered. She was right. LeBlanc had a lean list of series credits by that time, and his biggest gig thus far had been a long-running commercial for Heinz ketchup. Even in a cast of relative unknowns, he stood out as a newbie. And it didn’t help that he walked into the audition room with a hangover and a bloody nose.

LeBlanc had gotten into acting as a side gig. He’d grown up in Nonantum, or “The Lake,”²⁸ a predominantly Italian-American village in Newton, Massachusetts. There, he said, “everybody had some type of trade. That’s what you did.” His was carpentry, which he began studying during high school, and later at Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology. He left after one semester (thinking that, in this line of work, higher education was basically pointless, “like going to LEGO college”), and started working on a construction crew building houses in the nearby suburb, Natick. He had skill as a carpenter (certainly more than Joey would), and he had a good job. But he was also eighteen and, as he put it, “I got ants in my pants.”

A friend suggested he go down to New York and give modeling a shot. He was already in great shape from his labor-intensive job, and it could be a good way to make some money on the side. He went down to the city to meet a photographer, shelling out five hundred bucks for a set of head shots. The photographer was happy to take his money, though declined to inform him that, at 5'10", he would never be hired as a model. Looking around, LeBlanc figured it out for himself, but there was no getting his money back. He headed back down to the street, feeling like an idiot. Then he saw a girl.

Telling this story decades later, LeBlanc had to admit it—the moment that changed his life was a very Joey moment. The girl passed him on the sidewalk and he turned around to check her out. She turned around to check him out, too, and they both started laughing. The young woman was an actress on her way to an audition and invited him to tag along. She’d later introduce him to her manager, who thought LeBlanc had a great look for commercials and signed him as a client. “I’d just hoped to get laid before I got back on the train,” he recalled. “So, I was pretty happy with how that turned out.”

LeBlanc did have fast and remarkable success in commercials, doing ads for Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, 7 Up, Fruitful Bran, and Heinz in his first three years alone. The ads gave him a degree of experience, and enough cash to pay for real training. He signed up for classes with Flo Greenberg, founder of the Actor’s Workshop. After the success of the Heinz commercial, LeBlanc began to get calls from LA, urging him to come out and read for sitcoms. LeBlanc hesitated—not because he didn’t want the jobs, but because he felt he just wasn’t good enough yet. He still knew more about carpentry than acting.

“Everybody wanted him,” Greenberg later said. “He said to me, ‘Flo, I’m not quite ready to go. I know that we need to work a little bit more.’” But it was now or never. If he waited too long, the buzz from the commercial would fade and there’d be another hot new face all over the television. He asked Greenberg if she would let him come back and work with her soon. Maybe he’d make some sitcom money and then he could fly back to New York for a whole month to train with her. Would that be okay? She told him, of course, anytime, and then she urged him out the door, knowing this was goodbye. “He was sent for, and he had to go.”

Of course, the buzz faded, anyway. LeBlanc was not an instant star, though he did book a series, TV 101, starring Sam Robards, which ran on CBS and was canceled in its first season. In 1991, he landed a recurring role on Married with Children, playing Kelly Bundy’s boyfriend, Vinnie Verducci. He’d play the role again on the spin-off series Top of the Heap, and then once more on the spin-off of that spin-off Vinnie & Bobby—both of which were canceled after seven episodes. Next came some music-video gigs, a couple episodes of Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries, and a few more Italian Guy characters. If he was bothered by getting pigeonholed into this macho, leather-jacket niche, he didn’t complain. It was a stereotype, yes, and often quite an ugly one with undertones of criminality and misogyny that had plagued the Italian-American community since long before The Godfather. But again, it’s unlikely that any of that crossed LeBlanc’s mind as a young twentysomething with bills to pay, and absolutely nothing to pay them with. Beggars can’t be choosers, and by early 1994, that’s pretty much what he was. The commercial money was gone, and one day he checked his bank balance and knew he’d have to find another guest spot (or a day job) immediately. So when his agent called saying he’d been asked to read for a pilot role—another chauvinistic, leather-clad Italian Guy—LeBlanc said yes, please. He had eleven dollars.

Then LeBlanc had a really stupid idea—and not a Joey-style stupid idea that ends in laughter and knee-slapping. It was his buddy’s suggestion actually, but LeBlanc went along with it, perhaps because he was so excited just to have a potential new gig. The night before the audition, LeBlanc was hanging out with another actor, running his lines. His friend had a thought: This was a show about young, close friends, right? So, maybe they should quit practicing and instead go out and “prepare”—by getting shitfaced. Just like real friends do, right? Right!

Cut to the next morning: LeBlanc woke up on his friend’s couch, stumbled into the bathroom, tripped and fell face-first onto the edge of the toilet seat. A few hours later, he was standing in an audition room, in front of Kauffman, delivering a monologue about women and ice cream.²⁹ Kauffman looked at him—at the enormous bloody gash running the entire length of his nose. “What happened to your face?”

This anecdote would become Friends lore in years to come—the story of how Matt LeBlanc Joey’d his way into stardom. But back then, it seemed to underscore LeBlanc’s youth and inexperience. Still, Kauffman and Crane loved his reading. LeBlanc had made the choice to play Joey as dim-witted, though they hadn’t written him as such. It worked so well, giving Joey a sense of innocence and sweetness, which tempered his machismo. And LeBlanc had a knack for playing dumb—no easy feat in comedy. It wasn’t broad or childish; LeBlanc just played him a little ditzy. That was great for the character, but if this guy was a nitwit in real life—and what with the toilet injury, he wasn’t coming off like a genius—they’d be sunk. Hank Azaria had also come in to read for the part (and would later be cast as David, Phoebe’s beloved Scientist Guy), and he seemed a safer bet. They were leaning toward him when Barbara Miller, then the head of casting at Warner Bros., stepped in. “I’ll never forget this,” Kauffman recalled. “She said, ‘This is the actor who will get better every episode. He can do it.’”

Late one night, Warren Littlefield pulled into a Chevron gas station on Sunset Boulevard. Filling up his car, he looked up and saw a familiar face. It was Jennifer Aniston, a young actress he knew well, having seen her in a handful of failed NBC pilots. The biggest role she’d had thus far was in their series adaptation of the hit film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which she’d played the lead’s sister, Jeannie.³⁰ With thirteen episodes shot, it had been her longest running sitcom yet. But it was weak and panned from the start, the show’s flaws made even more glaring when compared to its brilliant source material. Ferris Bueller had been canceled during its first season, and now Aniston was adrift. By the night she ran into Littlefield at the gas station, she was beginning to run out of steam. Even worse, she suspected the industry was beginning to tire of her, too. “I was the failed sitcom queen,” she’d reflect, twenty years later. Sooner or later she’d be out of chances, so maybe she should just beat them to the punch and quit. Aniston had nothing to lose, and so she approached the president of NBC, standing at the gas pump, and asked him outright: “Will it ever happen for me?”

It was a question that, up until that point, Aniston hadn’t worried too much about. She was an actor, had always been one—just one of those people born with the performance instinct. To her luck and/or detriment, she was also born the child of actors. Her mother, Nancy Dow, had only a handful of television credits, but her father, John Aniston, was already a frequent soap-opera actor by the time she was born, and would eventually become well known for playing Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives.³¹ On top of that, her godfather was Telly Savalas, a television legend and friend of her dad’s. Aniston was born in Sherman Oaks, California, but her parents divorced when she was nine, and she grew up primarily with her mother, in New York City.

Aniston was sent to the Rudolf Steiner School, which used the Waldorf education method—meaning, no TV allowed. Sometimes she could barter a few hours of television, especially if she was home sick, but that only made it more thrilling to her. Sometimes she even caught a glimpse of her dad, now a rising soap star. It’s no surprise that, as Aniston’s own acting ambitions developed, they were aimed squarely at the television. She recalled: “I wanted to be in that box.”

As a New Yorker, she was a theater lover, too. Her mom took her to see Annie on Broadway, as well as shows that were less “age appropriate” but highly regarded, like Mark Medoff’s play Children of a Lesser God. By high school, she knew the acting thing wasn’t just a phase. Aniston was accepted at New York’s High School of Performing Arts (aka the Fame school), and from that point on, she said, “I didn’t think I could do anything else, honestly.” Her father was less than thrilled, knowing that committing to this profession would more than likely lead to heartbreak or, at best, great disappointment. Yes, he’d eventually found a degree of success and a steady job, but both those things were vanishingly rare. And even if she was as lucky as he, it wouldn’t inoculate her to heartbreak or struggle. By then, her parents had gone through a rough divorce, and despite having a soap-star dad, Aniston grew up perpetually broke. She’d see those girls from the Upper East Side, with their perfect clothes and their hair just so, imagining with envy what their lives must be like. It was those girls she’d think of, almost a decade later, when she saw the breakdown for a character on a new pilot she was up for: a pretty, stylish, spoiled young woman who had everything and never had to work for any of it.

But that was still years down the line. First came the receptionist job at the ad agency, and then scooping ice cream at Sedutto’s, and the two days she spent as a Manhattan bike messenger before realizing what a terrible idea that was. There were the way-off-Broadway plays and other not-quite “acting” gigs. One day when she was eighteen, she got a job reading a Nutrisystem ad on Howard Stern’s show—having no idea who Howard Stern was. (“It was quite a rude awakening, shall we say.”)

Her father now lived in LA, and every summer she’d fly out to visit him. At first she insisted she’d never actually move out there. Like so many New York actors (all New Yorkers, really), she had a sense of snobbery about Hollywood. New York was where real actors lived, honing their craft in black-box theaters, paying dues while waiting tables, and then drawing hoards to Broadway or Shakespeare in the Park. But while she loved her rinky-dink theater gigs, they didn’t pay the bills. And unlike Matt LeBlanc, who’d barely been in New York a day before booking his first commercial, she never even came close. “I couldn’t book a commercial to save my life,” she said. Even with her waitressing job, she was barely getting by. The older she got, the more she felt drawn to the west coast, where there were jobs aplenty and the streets were paved with scripts.

During her next visit with her dad, Aniston decided to extend the trip. She extended it again. Finally, she caved. She borrowed a hundred bucks from a friend to get a set of head shots, and started going out on auditions. In the meantime, she got a telemarketing gig, selling timeshare properties in the Poconos—a job at which she was terrible. “I’d just apologize profusely and hang up the phone,” she said. “Thank God that only was two weeks.” By then, she’d booked her first TV job.

Aniston costarred on Molloy, alongside Mayim Bialik (who was post-Beaches but pre-Blossom). It was canceled seven episodes in, and thus began Aniston’s four-year reign as the failed sitcom queen. And, for a while, that was fine by her. It wasn’t The Dream, but she was still getting paid to act. She’d shoot a few episodes, the show would get canned, and she’d walk away with a few months’ rent money and look for the next gig. It beat the hell out of bike messengering. But eventually Aniston realized she was going in circles, not actually making progress. She did have a few small successes along the way: a guest spot on Quantum Leap, a sketch comedy show called The Edge (which lasted for eighteen episodes), and the dubious honor of starring in Leprechaun. This film would eventually become a cult classic, and the basis for an endless series of sequels. But, like black-box theater, cult classics don’t pay the bills, either—nor do they typically pave the way for mainstream stardom. Not that it seemed in the cards for her, anyway.

“Will it ever happen for me?” Aniston asked Littlefield that night at the gas station. “God, I wanted it to,” he recalled. But he just didn’t know. Then he got a script from Kauffman and Crane.

Rachel was always going to be the hardest part to cast. Bright, Kauffman, Crane, and everyone else knew it. “The role is potentially so unlikable,” Crane said. “She’s spoiled and whiny and upset, and she’s crying, and no one likes to see that.” They auditioned everyone, said Kauffman: “Thousands and thousands of women came in.” Nothing.

In the meantime, Aniston booked another gig—not just a pilot, but a series, in which she was cast as a one of the leads. Muddling Through was shot in the winter of 1993–94, then shelved until it was scheduled as a summer series on CBS—which, if successful, could be extended into the fall. The show revolved around Connie Drego (Stephanie Hodge), a woman returning home to run her family’s motel, after doing two years in prison for shooting her cheating husband (not fatally, in the butt). Aniston played her eldest daughter, Madeline, who’d married the cop who arrested her mother. Now the whole family would have to find a way to muddle on through this awkward scenario and come together to run the motel. The show wasn’t in the same league as Friends, but it wasn’t an obvious stinker, either (certainly no LAX 2194).

Kauffman and Crane were still adamant about not casting actors in second position, but Aniston was an exception. Not because she was a big name, but the opposite—because she was indeed the failed sitcom queen. She’d done so many NBC pilots that the network knew her well, and despite her series track record, they still believed in her as an actress. Aniston already had Littlefield’s approval, meaning that, if Kauffman and Crane liked her reading, she wouldn’t have to audition for the NBC execs. That would be one less hurdle for the producers (a big one), and at this point they still hadn’t officially nailed down most of the cast. Each actor had to get the okay from them, from Warner Bros., and from the network, so until the contracts were signed, anything could change. They asked Aniston to come in and read—for the role of Monica.

Aniston took one look at the script and thought, No, not Monica. Rachel. It wasn’t that she related to Rachel, but that she knew her instantly. “She was everything I wasn’t,” Aniston said. “A rich, spoiled princess from a family who had everything.” Rachel breezed into that coffee shop and made herself the center of attention, without worrying for a second about rejection or failure or credit card debt. She expected to be welcomed and so she was. She expected coffee, and so it appeared in her hand (“Sweet’N Low?”). Aniston thought of those Upper East Side girls who walked around Manhattan like they owned it, or they could with one swipe of their Amex. She knew Rachel like the back of her hand, because she’d grown up watching her, fantasizing about what it would be like to step into her fine shoes.

Courteney Cox had a degree of clout when she’d asked to read for another role, but it was a gutsy move for someone in Aniston’s position. Still, the producers didn’t have a Rachel, and they hadn’t seen anyone who’d even come close.³² So they agreed to let Aniston give it a shot. “We saw Jennifer,” remembered Bright. “It was like—wow. After all these months and hearing so many people read it, this was the person.” Aniston embodied Rachel so perfectly, embracing both her naïveté and her self-centeredness, without making her a brat. Okay, maybe she was a brat, but not a mean girl. She was selfish, absolutely, but never vicious. There was something about Aniston’s Rachel that made you forgive her, even while rolling your eyes. You wanted to see her get knocked down by reality, because she sure as hell needed it—but you also wanted to see her get up, and grow up.

“She was, head and shoulders, the best one,” said Crane. It was a gamble, but they had to take it. Aniston got the call that very afternoon. With Littlefield’s support, Bright, Kauffman, and Crane cast Aniston as Rachel, then held their breath to see what happened with Muddling Through. “We asked to see a couple of episodes,” said Bright. “It didn’t have ‘failure for sure’ written on it, like the baggage-handler show. But we felt it was kind of weak.”

Meanwhile, Friends was looking stronger by the day. Once the cast was at last assembled and the contracts signed, they sat down for the first table-read. That was the moment everyone realized the real casting miracle: these actors weren’t just perfect for their parts, but for each other. There was a palpable energy between them as they began to read. “We were like six pieces of a puzzle that just felt like, okay, this works,” David Schwimmer recalled. They got the show on its feet, running through a rehearsal on the Central Perk set, and when Kauffman saw them together, doing that opening scene for the first time, a chill ran down her spine. “I remember the atmosphere being electric. I knew we had something special.”

Still, special doesn’t always mean successful. Lisa Kudrow was just as bowled over by her castmates and the magic she felt between them. “Oh, my God,” Lisa Kudrow thought. “Well, this is kind of fun and exciting.” But a sure thing? No way. “There was absolutely no reason to think it was definitely going to go.” A great script and a great team were just two of many more things that had to go right, and like everyone else, Crane was shocked every time they did: “We were always surprised when it kept, like, happening.”

Even once the pilot was shot and well received, there were still months of uncertainty to come. They’d been given a full season, and so they kept moving right along, shooting “The One with the Sonogram at the End” and “The One with the Thumb.” Meanwhile, Muddling Through came on the air in July 1994. As expected, it wasn’t an immediate hit—nor was it an obvious flop. Burrows approached Aniston on set one day and said, “You know they’re going to pick that show up, just to try to mess with Friends