Matthew Perry confessed that, before they appeared together on Friends, he asked Jennifer Aniston out, but she rejected him.
“She said she would love to be my friend and I said, 'We can't be friends!'” the actor recalled.
In an excerpt from his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing published in The Times, Perry explained that he and Aniston were the only ones who knew each other before filming the series, having met three years earlier through mutual friends.
"I was immediately captivated by her (how could I not be?) and I found her interesting, with the sense that she might have felt the same way, maybe it could have been something," he remarked.
At that time, Perry had just received news of landing a role in a sitcom, and he reached out to Aniston, sharing, "You're the first person I wanted to share this with."
"In hindsight, it wasn't a great idea," he admitted. "The coldness was palpable through the phone. Looking back, it was clear that this gave her the impression I liked her too much or in the wrong way… and I compounded my error by asking her out."
"She declined (which made dating her quite challenging), but she mentioned she'd like to be friends, and I made it worse by responding, 'We can't just be friends!'"
Perry confessed that his attraction to Aniston didn't diminish, but they were able to move beyond their history and focus on delivering the best work Hollywood had to offer on Friends.
He continued, "During the early days of filming Friends, I realized I still had feelings for Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. I started to wonder, how long is it acceptable to gaze at her? Is three seconds too long?"
"But that shadow dissipated in the warm glow of the series. (That, and her evident lack of interest)."
Perry wasn't the only member of the Friends cast who felt drawn to Aniston.
During the show's reunion special last year, David Schwimmer and Aniston disclosed that they nearly had a secret off-screen romance in the early seasons of the show.
"In the first season, I was deeply in love with Jen, and we both had strong feelings for each other, but it was like two ships passing in the night because one of us was always in a relationship, and we never crossed that line," Schwimmer recounted.
Aniston affirmed that the feelings were mutual, mentioning that they would "snuggle and fall asleep on the couch" during breaks from rehearsals.
