Crane and Kauffman initially pictured Joey and Monica as the central romantic couple for the show. Joey, the perpetual horndog, would be lured, and possibly tamed, by the warm, affectionate Monica. In this initial version, Joey was less dim-witted than he would eventually become, with an emphasis on his ladies’-man style and his city-boy attitude. Initially, the casting search was for more of a leading-man type. Crane was taken aback to find that this approach led Joey to feel more boring than they had expected him to be. None of the actors they brought in to audition conveyed the charm they had in mind. As it stood, Joey felt as if he did not belong in this particular circle of friends.
Casting assistant Stacy Alexander had brought Kanner a tape of an actor who had begun to make a name for himself on low-rent Fox comedy series like Married . . . with Children, Top of the Heap, and Vinnie & Bobby. The material was notably different, but there was something about Matt LeBlanc that could possibly work for the role of Joey. “He could be perfect,” thought Kanner.
Matt LeBlanc had been born to a working-class family in the ritzy Boston suburb of Newton. LeBlanc grew up in a household run by his mother and did not meet his father, a Vietnam veteran, until he was eight years old.
He was in love with the roar and flash of motorcycles and sports cars, something he shared with his mechanic father. LeBlanc dreamed of success as a motorcycle racer and spent his leisure hours participating in youth racing events. He studied to be a carpenter but found the profession too staid for his more adventurous tastes. At eighteen, LeBlanc left Newton for New York, intent on pursuing a career as a model but was repeatedly told he was too short.
One day, LeBlanc was walking down the street when he paused to check out a beautiful woman’s butt. As it happened, she had paused to check out his butt, and the two laughed about their undisguised attraction. She told him she was an actress and was on the way to an audition. Why didn’t he come and meet her manager? LeBlanc agreed, and an impromptu career in acting was launched. He soon won roles in television commercials. LeBlanc was the intrepid young man in the Heinz commercial who placed a ketchup bottle at the edge of a building so he could drizzle it onto his hot dog on the street below.
LeBlanc came in for an audition for the role of Joey, and the producers were charmed. He had been running lines the previous day with a fellow actor, and, inspired by the script’s celebration of friendship, they had gone out for a drink together. LeBlanc, having perhaps gotten a bit too friendly, fell down and scraped his nose. When he came in to read, Kauffman asked what had happened to his face, and LeBlanc, replying, “Aw, it’s a long story,” launched into a description of his night on the town. Kauffman laughed at the story, and LeBlanc felt that the audition had suddenly tilted in his favor.
LeBlanc was not nearly as experienced as some of the other actors they were considering, but he had the remarkable capacity to continue improving each time they came back to him. He could naturally pull off the machismo and arrogance of Joey, but he also had an appealing sweetness to him. LeBlanc had the rare gift of likability. Even when Joey was saying something that might come off as hateful emerging from another character’s mouth, LeBlanc was able to make it seem charming. They decided to bring him back for a test and ultimately offered him the role of Joey.
After LeBlanc’s audition, Crane and Kauffman began to rethink the role. Joey was still an actor, but he would now come with an outer-borough, working-class demeanor. The changes meant that it no longer made quite so much sense to have Joey and Monica as the central couple. That role was now open to be filled by other characters. LeBlanc himself had pushed for Joey to be more like a big brother to his female friends, never attempting to woo any of them. Kauffman thought the idea of Joey and Monica had made sense on the page, but once Cox and LeBlanc were cast, it no longer did.
Meanwhile, other roles were trickier to fill. The surprise switch to Monica for Cox had left the character of Rachel open once more. Crane thought the role of Rachel was an exceedingly tough one. He and Kauffman intended Rachel to be charming and warm and modestly clueless, but he worried that, in the wrong hands, she might become incredibly unlikable. Crane did not want Rachel to be perceived as a spoiled, petulant, husband-abandoning mess and needed the right actress who would telegraph Rachel’s more attractive personality traits.
Rachel was described as someone who had belatedly come to a realization about her own life: “What happened was, she was in the room with all the presents, looking at the gravy boat, this gorgeous china gravy boat, and she realized she was more turned on by the gravy boat than by Barry, the man she’s about to marry. So she got really freaked out and got high with Mindy, her maid of honor, and while she was getting high she realized that Barry looks an awful lot like Mr. Potato Head. She always knew he looked familiar. So she had to get out of there.” Rachel was a young woman who unexpectedly had to start over again: “She decides to move to the city because she knows if she stays in Teaneck and she doesn’t marry Barry, she’ll marry Gary or Larry.”
Numerous actors, including Saved by the Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley, had come in to read for the part. Kanner liked an experienced young actress named Jennifer Aniston, who had starred in an ill-fated television adaptation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on NBC in 1990–91. Kanner was charmed by Aniston, but she was already committed to another series. Aniston’s series Muddling Through, picked up by CBS, had already shot eight episodes, and while they had yet to air it—generally the kiss of death for a new series—they still retained the right to do so. And if they did, Aniston would remain contractually obligated to the series.
Kanner decided to take the risk and have Aniston come in to read in second position. This meant that NBC did not have first dibs on Aniston, whose availability would be dependent on Muddling Through’s getting canceled. When Crane and Kauffman first saw Aniston, they fell in love with her, rooting for Rachel to find her footing in spite of herself. Jennifer Aniston could be the heart of their series.
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She had to lose thirty pounds if she wanted to stay in Hollywood. Los Angeles was a tough place to be an actress—it was a tough place to be a woman—and Jennifer Aniston’s agent was reluctantly leveling with her. She had been called back for an audition, and this time, she was requested to arrive in a leotard and tights. “This’ll blow it for me,” she joked with her agent, and was surprised when he responded seriously. Aniston was hardly fat—everyone could see she was beautiful—but as the show she would one day become indelibly associated with later made a point of noting, the camera added ten pounds, and if Aniston wanted to be competitive for television roles, she would have to slim down.
Hollywood was a tough business, but Jennifer Aniston had known this her entire life. Her father, John Aniston, was an actor who had spent years as a featured performer on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. Her godfather was none other than Kojak himself, Telly Savalas. Acting was a struggle. It took years for John Aniston to make a steady living from it. He had been selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, subsisting on the occasional acting job Savalas could toss his way.
Her parents divorced when Aniston was nine years old, and her father was suddenly a ghost in their own home, an absence. She would sneak peeks of Search for Tomorrow to catch a glimpse of him. Aniston would record the dialogue of shows like Joanie Loves Chachi on cassettes and then play them in her room, seeing what it felt like to pretend to be Joanie.
When she was twenty, Aniston moved to Los Angeles. Aniston was pretty and sweet and unthreatening, and Hollywood liked her for roles as younger sisters and bratty upstarts on shows like Ferris Bueller and Molloy, which lasted for all of seven episodes. Friends Like Us was an opportunity to play a more significant leading-woman role, and she wanted it badly.
Crane knew that Aniston was committed to Muddling Through and decided to approach its showrunner to see if he would release her so she could join the Friends Like Us cast. In retrospe
ct, Crane could not believe his own audacity. How would he have responded if the showrunner from some other show asked him to release one of the actors they had worked so hard to find so they could star in some entirely different show? Crane was politely but firmly turned down. Aniston made her own efforts to escape, approaching Leslie Moonves and crying to him about the situation in the hopes that he would help her escape her CBS straitjacket. This, too, did not work.
Ellie Kanner was about to leave for a much-needed vacation when she received a telephone call telling her that Muddling Through had been picked up by CBS. The Tiffany Network was getting to not only express its optimism in one of its own series but also potentially blow a giant hole in its rival’s schedule.
Kanner was told it was time to recast the role of Rachel. She proceeded to spend the next month looking at head shots and overseeing auditions, but no one captivated her the way Aniston had. The role was offered to Téa Leoni, who was a superlative actor and comedian but might have come off as too sophisticated to play a role like Rachel.
Leoni turned the role down, and the network soon called Crane, summarily informing him that Rachel had been offered to Jami Gertz, a sitcom veteran from Square Pegs and The Facts of Life who had also appeared on Dream On. Crane had always liked Gertz but believed she was wrong for Rachel. Moreover, Gertz was a Sabbath-observant Jew, and she asked the showrunners to commit to a Wednesday-to-Tuesday schedule, where shoots would take place on Tuesday nights, and not Friday nights, as with many other shows. The showrunners respected Gertz’s commitment (Bright would later call her “the Sandy Koufax of show business”) but could not lock themselves into such an arrangement.
They also shared with Gertz their conception of the show as an ensemble, lacking a single star, and were under the impression that she was looking for a series that could serve as more of a vehicle. Crane and Kauffman sweated out the lengthy wait until the next day, when Gertz passed on the show. They were relieved that they had not yet lost control of casting their series.
Eventually, CBS and NBC negotiated a temporary détente. CBS would allow Aniston to be cast in both series but would unambiguously retain first position for their show. Aniston would be able to shoot the first six episodes of Friends Like Us. But if the CBS series was picked up, Friends Like Us would lose Aniston midway through the season. It was an enormous risk.
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Kauffman and Crane knew what they were in search of for the role of Chandler. The character had a certain timbre to the way his lines should be delivered, and they were hoping to find a performer who could capture the music in their heads. Crane thought it would be the easiest role to cast, consisting almost exclusively of a string of jokes to be rattled off. And yet no one could quite capture the sound they were looking for.
Chandler was to be “the droll observer of everybody else’s life. And his own.” He was an office drone who knows his job is “killing his brain cells and his sperm. But it’s a place to make long distance calls from.” Chandler was a romantic sad sack with “a knack for finding women who turn out wierd [sic].” They would be the type who “wants to play the girl scout and the man who won’t buy the cookies. Or another wants him to accept her Lord. A Lord that none of us is familiar with.”
Chandler was a self-consciously comic role—a character who believed himself to be funny and used humor as a protective mechanism—and required an actor who could sell both the humor and the damaged self-confidence. In the first wave of actors coming in to read for Chandler, only one actor seemed to grasp what he should sound like: a twenty-four-year-old Canadian named Matthew Perry. Perry had appeared on Dream On, and he had an innate comic flair and a truly remarkable gift for delivering each line in an unexpected fashion.
Perry, though, was also already committed to another series: the futuristic ABC sitcom LAX 2194. Perry was to star alongside Ryan Stiles and Kelly Hu in a show about futuristic airport employees. Stiles was a robot customs agent and Hu his exasperated human partner, with Perry in a supporting role as a baggage handler tasked with sorting aliens’ luggage. It simply could not be possible to come up with a more ludicrous sitcom premise, nor to find one less likely to ever make it to air, but Perry, whose business manager had just informed him that he was flat broke, had begged his agents to find him any work, and LAX 2194 it was.
Kauffman, Crane, and Bright were at a loss as to how to proceed. Perry was clearly the best performer they had seen, but they could not have him. And Warner Bros. refused to allow them to place any more actors in second position at this point, meaning that Perry was entirely off the table.
Kauffman and Crane saw numerous actors, including Jon Favreau, and had also been impressed by a young actor named Craig Bierko. He was not quite Perry’s equal, but the casting process was often a matter of compromise, and Bierko’s mien reminded the producers of Perry. NBC had signed Bierko to a deal, and they were intent on finding a role for him in an NBC series. The network pressured Kauffman, Crane, and Bright to cast Bierko as Chandler. They brought Bierko back for another audition and wound up offering him the role.
Bright was despondent at the thought of Bierko’s being on their show. He was a terrific performer and a superlative actor, but he was not Chandler. Bright believed he lacked the instinctive comic pop that such a showy role demanded. He could not credibly convey the acerbic, sarcastic, self-deprecating, but surprisingly lovable persona that they were looking for in Chandler. Bierko was, by all accounts, a pleasure to work with. He just was not right for this particular role.
Bierko, too, had his doubts. He was looking for a starring role, not a part in an ensemble. Bierko wound up turning down Friends Like Us. Years later, Bright would receive a letter from Bierko, in which he expressed his realization that in turning down the part of Chandler, he had missed out on the role of a lifetime.
Later, the showrunners found out that Bierko had been practicing for the role by running his lines with another actor: Matthew Perry. Bierko was a talented actor and would go on to have an impressive career in series like UnREAL, but Kauffman and Crane realized that what they liked about him for the role of Chandler was merely a reflection of Matthew Perry, and that Bierko had been tutored by Perry to play the role as he would have. They learned that Perry liked the role of Chandler so much that he was coaching numerous other actors on how to play the part.
It was mid-April, and they were still looking to cast the role of Chandler. Crane began to wonder if the fault did not lie in their own writing. Was Chandler simply a poorly written role? Then there was some good news from Warner Bros. WB executive David Janollari had seen the pilot of LAX 2194 and returned with a verdict: There was absolutely no chance of its making it to air on ABC. “Look,” Janollari said, “I know he’s not available, but I think he’s great as Chandler, and he should go as second position.” Kanner was not senior enough to make that call, but Janollari could, and so Kanner, with a sense of relief, agreed: “Great, I’ll get him in.”
Perry could be called back for a second audition. Crane felt the cartoon sweat flying off him, an expression of his overwhelming relief at having an actor he felt was up to the task of playing Chandler. Perry was brought in to read with Aniston, Cox, and LeBlanc, with another actor filling in for David Schwimmer as Ross. Perry impressed the producers once more with his ability to find a fresh method of delivering Chandler’s lines, and they knew that no other performer would come as close to what they imagined their character would sound like.
Normally, a casting director was merely supposed to usher the actor out of the room, murmuring sweet nothings like “good job” but not offering any more information about casting. After Perry finished his audition, Kanner asked him to wait for a moment while she conferred with the producers. Everyone compared notes, and there was unanimous agreement that Perry was so superb there was no way anyone else could play the role. Kanner ran out of the room, pointed to Perry, and gave him a thumbs-up. P
erry was shocked: “What?! Really? What?” Kanner had the rare pleasure of immediately sharing life-changing news with an actor she had championed: “Yeah, you got the job!”
* * *
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After Perry joined the cast, the business-affairs department at NBC approached Littlefield and warned him that the role of Rachel needed to be recast. It was simply too great a risk to leave a promising show like Friends Like Us open to sabotage or self-destruction when it could so easily be avoided. Warner Bros. asked Littlefield if he was willing to cover the costs for reshoots if Aniston wound up being unavailable, and he said he would. Littlefield was cognizant of how important good casting could be for the future success of a show and was willing to take a major risk in order to keep the most preferred version of the cast together. But Littlefield also had a plan. He was going to call Preston Beckman.
Muddling Through had already shot a half-dozen episodes, none of which had aired, and CBS, after some dithering, ultimately chose to put the show on its summer schedule, in the relative dead zone of Saturday nights. Hearing the news, Littlefield turned to Beckman, NBC’s scheduling guru, with a two-word order: “Kill it.”
Beckman returned with a crafty suggestion for eliminating Muddling Through’s prospects. Beckman was sitting on a trove of unreleased original TV films adapted from Danielle Steel novels. They were practically guaranteed to attract a substantial, and substantially female, audience. If they were to be scheduled opposite Muddling Through? Well, no show about an ex-con motel manager and her daffy family was likely to provide stiff competition for Steel’s glamorous romances.
Beckman would schedule the Steel movies for the first few Saturday nights Muddling Through was on the air, with repeats scheduled for the weeks that followed. It was a necessary sacrifice, giving up some of the ratings the movies might have garnered on another, more attractive night in exchange for eliminating a rival to potential future Thursday-night success.
Generation Friends Page 5