I'll Be There For You: The ultimate book for Friends fans everywhere

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/director

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo)) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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?

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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.

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.