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

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 gigs

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.