The Truth About Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston’s Friendship
It can be awfully disappointing to find out that two co-stars who so convincingly played a devoted duo on TV or in a movie together don’t actually get along in real life.
Or, also deflating, don’t have much to do with each other off camera.
Particularly when the desired relationship is in the title of the show, like Friends!
So thank goodness Monica Gellar and Rachel Green had a real friendship while shooting the classic sitcom and, 14 years after the show ended, after much rain has poured, are still there for each other.
In the past two weeks alone Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston have been all dressed up with somewhere to be together twice, first at a benefit dinner in Malibu and then at AFI’s Lifetime Achievement Award gala honoring George Clooney. In February Cox hosted a ladies’ day for Aniston’s 49th birthday at her Malibu home, the duo went out to dinner with Ellen DeGeneres last month—and today being Cox’s 54th birthday, could there be a better time to get together again?
Meanwhile, these are just the gatherings that people know about.
Surely the two ladies, who once upon a time auditioned for each other’s iconic roles and who’ve since celebrated good times and consoled each other through the tough times, felt the weird weight of the world’s expectations that they be besties early on.
And two decades ago, judging by their initial interviews—often all in a group—with Katie Couric for Today or on The Oprah Winfrey Show—they were all still figuring out exactly how they wanted to go about the whole fame thing, and everyone was extremely careful about attributing each other equally for the show’s success. Then again, they may have actually meant every word of it, too.
“I think it was unspoken but we instinctively felt like we need to be friends, we need get along, we need to connect,” Lisa Kudrow (she’s totally still a friend too, for the record), recalled on NBC’s Must See TV: An All-Star Tribute to James Burrows in 2016. “So we started playing poker and Jimmy gave us his room so we could have a bigger hangout room for us.”
“We communicate well, we have a great time at rehearsal,” Aniston told Couric thoughtfully in 1994, “and it’s just the entire combination makes it jell.” Added Matt LeBlanc, also quite thoughtfully, “It’s pretty amazing, I mean I think we’re all really sort of taken aback by it because to us, down here, we’re all just sort of a theater group…We’re a really tight ensemble, we get along really well. It’s just a real productive environment and a great time.”
As the show rose from being the No. 2 comedy on the air to anchoring NBC’s Must See TV Thursday night lineup after Seinfeld ended in 1998 and being the biggest sitcom, personal lives and the six actors’ individual rising stars (Aniston’s the only one who won an Emmy, for instance) would get in the way of unadulterated togetherness, but they still shared an inimitable bond—one that proved essential for their ability to each secure $1 million-per-episode for Friends’ ninth and 10th seasons.
“We fell in love with each other and wanted to hang out,” Aniston recalled on the Burrows tribute. They even got together and watched the show every week, and Cox revealed that she and Kudrow started eating the “Jennifer” salad—a Cobb but with turkey bacon and the addition of garbanzo beans—for lunch every day.
When Friends was getting ready to sign off, the gang gathered on the set with Oprah for another group interview in November 2003, where Cox predicted that Aniston would cry after the final scene was shot—and Aniston started tearing up right there accordingly.
A few months after the wrap party, a very pregnant Cox joined Aniston, Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matthew Perry met again with Oprah, an empty chair waiting for LeBlanc, who was speeding over from the set of the close-to-forgotten spinoff Joey. The onscreen couples of the group (Perry and Cox, Aniston and Schimmwer) admitted they hadn’t seen each other in a few months, but Aniston and Cox seemed as if they’d just come from lunch. And the group’s overall electricity switched right back on upon reuniting as they recalled the emotional agony of shooting that the last episode together.
If it was jarring for audiences to be Central Perk-less, think of the six actors whose lives pretty much revolved around those characters for 10 years. At least we had reruns.
That last night “we did two huddles,” Aniston recalled.
