All six main characters from the hit series Friends are iconic and household names. We know them through and through as loyal viewers, just like the actors who played them. Yet it turns out that one of the actors thought one of the characters was gay! Here’s how it went down.
Huh, was a Friends character gay?
In the show Friends, there are many jokes about the idea that Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry, is gay. This was of course just a joke, but apparently one of the actors thought the character was actually into guys. Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe on the show, recently reflected on her time on Friends and revealed that she had the misconception. She was a guest on the Connan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast, where she revealed that she mistook Chandler for a gay character early on in the show. “I thought that Chandler character, when I read it, I thought, ‘Oh, they have a gay character, that’s good,’” she explained. “That’s all I heard, you know.” She then went on to explain that she was very surprised by how Matthew Perry portrayed the character during one of the first table reads for the show. She explained how he really made the character his own. “With his own rhythm and everything. It’s his own. Impeccable timing, but also just hilarious.”
It could have been done!
Chandler turned out not to be gay after all. In the series, he got into a relationship with Monica Geller, played by Courtney Cox. In the seventh season of the series, the two characters got married. The scene with their engagement is perhaps one of the most romantic scenes ever! However, it turned out that it wasn’t a crazy idea for Chandler not to be straight. David Crane, co-creator of Friends, explained that the writers could have chosen a different direction for Chandler’s sexuality. “We didn’t go into this determined that Chandler would be straight.” If we had cast a different actor — who was gay — there was the option that we would have taken the character in that direction.” Crane told The Advocate in 1996. Fortunately, the sitcom did have LGBTQI+ representation, which was quite unique for the time the series was on TV. For example, in season two, there was a wedding in which Ross’s ex-wife married her girlfriend Susan. In addition, there was a transgender character in season seven, namely Chandler’s father.
