Jennifer Aniston revealed during the Friends reunion that she had special feelings for David Schwimmer when they were shooting Friends.
Now Matthew Perry has admitted he knew all along that Jennifer and David were sweet on each other, adding once he found out, his longtime crush on Aniston ultimately ‘dissipated.’
‘But how can you not have a crush on Jennifer Aniston, you know?’ Matthew, 53, said heartwarmingly on The Jess Cagle Show.
Jennifer and David starred as Ross and Rachel, the on-off couple who left fans guessing throughout the series about whether they would end up together.
During last year’s highly-publicized reunion special, both actors confessed they had crushes on each other in real life during the show but never acted on them.
Matthew reflected with a wan smile in his new interview that he ‘knew what was going on’ between David and Jennifer at the time.
‘But at first it was just like, she would walk in and I’d be like: “Hey, good to see you!” and I’d go to my dressing room and I’d just go: “Oh, I’ll never be able to be with her,”‘ Perry said.
Eventually, however, he gathered himself and ‘did at one point just go: “All right, that’s enough. That’s enough. It’s been enough now.”‘
Matthew has been doing the media rounds for his new memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, in which he revealed that he asked Jennifer out before they were on the show but she amicably declined.
After he got over Jennifer, he temporarily developed feelings for Courteney Cox, who played his love interest on Friends, and their other female co-star Lisa Kudrow.
‘So I made it kind of difficult to go to work, because I had to pretend that I didn’t have these crushes,’ he told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.
After becoming a star he did carry on high-profile romances with such celebrities as Julia Roberts.
During his time on the show Matthew retained a close bond with Jennifer, who confronted him when his addictions were spiraling out of control.
He was surprised, thinking he had been effectively concealing his drinking from the rest of the cast, but she told him they could smell the alcohol on his breath.
‘But I wasn’t in a position to stop, you know?’ Matthew said during his latest Good Morning America appearance. ‘And that’s what addiction is. But she was the one that reached out the most, you know. I’m really grateful to her for that.’
‘In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,’ his book says. ‘This is what my co-stars on Friends did for me.’
In 2004, the year Friends ended, Jennifer gave Diane Sawyer an interview in which she broke down in tears discussing Matthew’s struggles with drugs and drink.
‘We didn’t know,’ she said. ‘We, you know, we weren’t equipped, we weren’t – to deal with it. You know, nobody had ever dealt with that and, you know, the idea of even losing him or….,’ she trailed off, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
Matthew had his first drink at 14 and was drinking daily by 18, before getting hooked on Vicodin in 1997 while recovering from a jet ski accident.
His memoir has been hitting the headlines in recent weeks for its blistering frankness about his addictions, including the effect alcohol had on his sex life.
One particularly candid story involved his failed attempts to lose his virginity to his 1980s girlfriend Tricia Fisher. ‘I sat there, soft and sad,’ he wrote.
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