Matthew Perry has revealed he harboured a secret crush on Jennifer Aniston during their early years on Friends.
The Chandler Bing actor said things became “awkward” between him and his co-star while filming the hit sitcom because he “badly” fancied her.
Matthew admitted his crush started three years prior to being cast on Friends when they met through mutual acquaintances.
He said he even asked Jennifer out at the time, but she turned him down.
Writing in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which is being serialised in The Times and The Sun, Matthew said he was “immediately taken” by Jennifer when they first met.
He said (via The Times): “I got the sense she was intrigued too – maybe it was going to be something. 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.’
“Bad idea. I could feel ice forming through the phone.”
He continued: “Looking back, it was clear that this 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!’”
After they were later cast as Chandler and Rachel in Friends together, Matthew said that even though he was “still attracted” to Jennifer, they “were able to sail right past the past” and focus on their jobs.
However, things then changed as filming went on, with Matthew continuing: “Fairly early in the making of Friends I realised that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, how long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?
“But that shadow disappeared in the hot glow of the show. (That, and her deafening lack of interest.)”
Matthew and Jennifer maintained a close bond, and she also once confronted him about his struggles with alcohol, with Matthew revealing she was the Friends cast member who “reached out the most”.
“I’m really grateful to her for that,” he said in an upcoming US TV interview.
Last year, Matthew and Jennifer came together with the rest of the main Friends cast for the much-hyped one-off reunion special, in which it was revealed she and David Schwimmer came close to being a real-life couple amid the romance between their characters Ross and Rachel.