“We can’t be friends!”: Matthew Perry Confesses He Loved Jennifer Aniston That Made Him Struggle While Filming FRIENDS, Moved On After Years of Rejection When Brad Pitt Entered the Scene
FRIENDS fans might not be able to watch the show in the same light ever again when they learn that Matthew Perry was actually in love with Jennifer Aniston for a long time before and during the making of the tremendously popular sitcom. The characters played by both these actors – Chandler Bing and Rachel Green were just friends on the show, with their respective love angles with other people, however, the knowledge that there were subliminal feelings beneath the façade makes things awkward in retrospection. Perry has revealed several of such scoops from his long life in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. which is slated for release on November 1.
Matthew Perry’s unrequited feelings for Jennifer Aniston
The 17 Again actor apparently held unrequited feelings for his FRIENDS costar for years. He wrote in his upcoming book that when he met the Marley and Me actress before filming with her, he was “immediately taken” by her. He further narrated how he called Jennifer Aniston with the bearings and that he booked two acting roles for the two of them, but he could not get the desired effect that he wanted.
“It was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way.”
He went on to ask her out but was turned down along with the suggestion that they remain friends. To this his response was, “[We] can’t be friends!”
Quite an ironic thing to say when we see the future that beheld them…
Down the line, when the two “friends” met for their first table read in 1994, Matthew Perry still had feelings for the We’re the Millers actress. However, they “were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.” But it didn’t stop there for the Fools Rush In actor. He claims to have over-analyzed every casual interaction that they engaged in during the course of the show.
Matthew Perry couldn’t get over his insecurities to keep dating Julia Roberts
Eventually, Perry moved on and the reasons were Aniston’s “deafening lack of interest” and the show’s blind success. And when Aniston started dating Brad Pitt in 1998, he had “long since gotten over her” and interacted with her normally “without it being awkward.”
More than that, the 53-year-old actor had started involving himself in other relationships. In 1995, he was romantically involved with the gorgeous Julia Roberts but he left her after a short two-month period. The reason? He felt,
“certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
The Pretty Woman actress even went on to make a guest appearance on the sitcom in 1996. She played a brief romantic interest for Chandler, and it ended horrendously for the latter in the episode, ‘The One After The Superbowl’, something like a foreshadowing one can say.
Source: Page Six
