Top 10 Dark Truths About Friends

The question of when to end a television show isn’t always an easy one. Sure, sometimes the network makes the decision for you. But when the show is a hit, deciding when to call it quits can often come down to the actors themselves. With “Friends,” that decision was reportedly almost made by Jennifer Aniston after Season 9. Aniston didn’t know if there were any more stories worth telling. And as she admitted to Matt Lauer in 2004, “I wanted it to end when people still loved us and we were on a high.” Who knows if they would’ve done a tenth season without Rachel, but we’re glad we never had to find out.

If you were a woman in the mid ‘90s, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you went into your local hair salon and asked for the “Rachel” haircut. And don’t worry, you weren’t alone - women everywhere were doing it. Eleven million in Britain alone admitted to giving the ‘do a try. But how did the woman who started it all feel about the look? Well, when Aniston first got the cut she loved it. But those feelings changed pretty quickly when “I was totally left with this frizzy mop on my head, because I had no idea how to do what [my stylist] did.” As she described it, maintaining the look was a high maintenance escapade involving a blowdryer and multiple brushes.

In January of 1996, tennis player Andre Agassi smashed all of his trophies and ripped up the walls in the room where he kept them in his house. Why did he do that? Was it because of a bad call on the court? Nope. It was because Brooke Shields licked Matt LeBlanc’s finger. Shields had scored a guest role on the Season 2 “The One After the Superbowl” episode of “Friends.” In said episode, she goes on a date with Joey and licks his hand. Agassi and Shields were dating at the time, and according to Agassi, hand-licking (even scripted hand-licking) was “over the line.” Seeing it sent him into a rage and he took that anger out on his tennis trophies.

Remember the episode where Joey injures his arm falling off his bed? No, that wasn’t how Matt LeBlanc hurt himself. However, it was how the writers incorporated his injury into the show. The actual injury took place during the filming of the prior episode, “The One Where No One’s Ready.” In that episode, Joey and Chandler are fighting over who gets to sit in the comfy chair, and at one point, they both go for the seat at the same time. In one take, LeBlanc’s dive didn’t go as planned, and he ended up dislocating his shoulder, leading to the sling that Joey is wearing in the next episode.

In 2007, three years after “Friends” ended its run on NBC, Lisa Kudrow fired her manager Scott Howard. In 2008, Howard sued Kudrow claiming that he was owed a 5% commission of her residuals from “Friends” and all other work he negotiated for her prior to his termination. One thing that made this all more difficult to determine was the fact that Kudrow and Howard had an oral - rather than written - agreement about it. However, while Kudrow won the initial summary judgment, a California appeals court reversed the ruling in 2014 and ordered Kudrow to pay Howard $1.6 million and a football phone (okay, they didn’t say anything about a football phone - but the money part is accurate).

Each of the six main cast members were paid $22,500 per episode in the first season. However, come the second season, each of the friends was paid a different amount ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 per episode. Well, that wasn’t going to work going forward. The group saw themselves as a true ensemble cast with no one more important than the others, and beginning with Season 3, they decided to negotiate their salary as a group. The network preferred to do it separately, but the gang held their ground. From that moment forward, they were all paid the same - which in Seasons 9 and 10, was $1 million per episode. Series co-creator Marta Kauffman called that number “Kinda ridiculous.”

“Friends” was such a huge hit from the moment it premiered that it didn’t just bring fame to its stars; it brought a mega-level of fame that is hard to understand. For David Schwimmer, it was just as hard to deal with. So much so that it didn’t just affect him, but his relationships with other people as well. As he told the Hollywood Reporter’s podcast “Awards Chatter” back in 2016, “It was pretty jarring and it [...] took years, I think, for me to adjust to [it] and become comfortable.” He was also an actor who, as part of his craft, liked to be anonymous and observe people out in the world. Well, he sure couldn’t do that anymore either.

To fans, she was the beautiful, funny, smarter-than-you-think Phoebe. But when Lisa Kudrow would see herself on television, all she saw was a “mountain of a girl.” Kudrow discussed her body issues on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast and revealed that trying to stay skinny took a physical toll on her body, telling Maron “when I was too thin, I was sick all the time.” Unfortunately, this societal pressure to be of a certain body type is one that many women deal with - and being rich and famous obviously doesn’t make it any easier.

David Schwimmer wasn’t the only one who found it hard to deal with the fame. Matt LeBlanc also struggled with it all, and eventually, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, needed to walk away for a while. After “Friends” ended and after “Joey” was canceled, LeBlanc barely left his house and basically told his agent to “Please lose my number for a few years.” There’s a pretty amazing silver lining in this dark cloud though, as LeBlanc used that time away to focus his attention on his new daughter Marina who had been diagnosed with cortical dysplasia. She has since outgrown the condition, and LeBlanc has called that time they spent together “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

We all forget things. It’s part of being human. But for “Friends” star Matthew Perry, his memory bank is missing three full years of filming the show that made him a star. After a trip to rehab in 1997 that didn’t stick, Perry spent the next three years or so in an substance-induced haze. Unfortunately, that led to pancreatitis, a car accident and that blank spot in his memory. Perry’s rock bottom came in 2001, and he’s been sober since. In 2022, he released a memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing” detailing his time with the series, both the good and the bad.