Matthew Perry was shooting to be more than friends before “Friends.”
The “Friends” star has been making the press rounds for his new memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” which will be available Nov. 1. In a recent interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News, he broke down how he made an advance at future costar Jennifer Aniston.
“Well, how can you not have a crush on Jenny? And Courtney? And Lisa?" He said in the conversation. “It made it kind of difficult to go to work, because I had to pretend that I didn’t.”
When filming the hit series, Perry couldn’t keep his eyes off Aniston.
“I was like, ‘Is three seconds too long? How long is…?’”
In the memoir Perry recalls that him and Aniston met around three years before “Friends” began.
“I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued, too – maybe it was going to be something,” he writes in the book. “Back then I got two jobs in one day – one was “Haywire,” an “America’s Funniest Home Videos”-type show, and the other was a sitcom. So I called Jennifer and I said, ‘You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to!’”
He quickly understood this was a bad move.
“Looking back, it was clear that his made her think I liked her too much or in the wrong kind of way… and I only compounded the error by then asking her out. She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’”
Things certainly didn’t remain awkward as the two were castmates for the entirety of the run of “Friends.”
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“Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing” hits shelves Nov. 1.
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