Friends star Matthew Perry has revealed in his new autobiography that it was his request that his character deliver the show’s final line.
Matthew spent 10 years playing Chandler Bing in the hit sitcom, which came to an end in 2004.
In the show’s final scene, the close-knit gang leaves Monica and Chandler’s apartment for the final time, with Rachel (played by Jennifer Aniston) suggesting they could go for a coffee before they part ways.
“Sure! Where?” Chandler then asks in the show’s last moments, a sarcastic comment given the group had exclusively hung out at Central Perk for the past decade.
In his recently-released memoir, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, Matthew shared that he actually asked to be given the show’s final line.
“Before that final episode, I’d taken [Friends producer] Marta Kauffman to one side,” he wrote, recalling that he told her: “Nobody else will care about this except me… so may I please have the last line?”
He continued: “That’s why as we all troop out of the apartment, and Rachel has suggested one last coffee, I got to bring the curtain down on Friends.
“I love the look on [David] Schwimmer’s face as I deliver that line — it’s the perfect mixture of affection and amusement, exactly what the show Friends had always given to the world.”
However, it was previously revealed that Matthew didn’t quite have the same emotional experience as his castmates while filming Friends’ final instalment.
“Ben, our first AD, and very close friend, shouted for the last time, ‘That’s a wrap,’ and tears sprang from almost everyone’s eyes like so many geysers,” he recalled.
“We had made 237 episodes, including this last one, called, appropriately enough, The Last One. Jennifer Aniston was sobbing — after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying... But I felt nothing.”
The Emmy nominee added: “I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside.”