Did any of the Friends cast date each other?
Given the obvious onscreen chemistry that Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry shared during their 10-year run on Friends, it’s little wonder that fans have long speculated about whether any of the cast were ever romantically entwined offscreen as well as on.
Matthew Perry recently claimed in an interview with Access that the six actors had a pact about not hooking up with their co-stars. “There was a rule that we had,” he explained, adding that the agreement was introduced by director Jim Burrows. “It was really important to the six of us that we kept a friendship, that we were friends.”
Co-star Courteney Cox remembered things slightly differently, saying she didn’t remember a formal ‘rule’. “I think it’s a smart idea,” she said, “But I don’t remember actually talking about it.”
What all six of the main cast can agree on is that they never dated within the group. Rumours that Aniston and Schwimmer replicated their onscreen relationship as Rachel and Ross in real life have been consistently denied by the pair’s representatives, and the same goes for Cox and Perry, who as Monica and Chandler married in the finale of the show’s seventh season.
While the central cast may have remained in the friend zone, there were a number of on-set romances. It has been reported that Perry began a “casual” relationship with Julia Roberts after her guest appearance on the show as Susie ‘Underpants’ Moss in 1996.
Meanwhile Aniston had a brief relationship with Paul Rudd, who appeared in the show as Phoebe’s boyfriend and eventual husband Mike. The pair met on the 1998 movie The Object of My Affection and dated for a short time before Aniston met Brad Pitt, who would eventually also guest star on the show while they were married.
More awkward was Aniston’s onscreen pairing with Tate Donovan, who played Rachel’s love interest Joshua in the show’s fourth season. Aniston and Donovan dated in real life for two-and-a-half years and even got engaged, but broke up shortly before he joined the cast. In 2013, Donovan told The Huffington Post: “We were broken up and the producers were like, ‘Hey would you wanna do six episodes of the show?’ And I was like ‘Maybe it would be good to work through this breakup.’”
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