- Matthew Perry said he had crushes on "Friends" costars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, and Lisa Kudrow.
- Perry said his crushes "made it kind of difficult to go to work" because he had to act normal.
Matthew Perry says that he had crushes on "Friends" costars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, and Lisa Kudrow, which made working on the sitcom more challenging.
"How can you not have a crush on Jenny, and Courteney, and Lisa?" Perry said in a new interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer. "So that made it kind of difficult to go to work because I had to pretend that I didn't have these crushes."
Perry opened up about starring on the hit NBC sitcom "Friends," which ran for 10 seasons between 1994 and 2004, in his new memoir set for release on Tuesday and titled "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing."
The show, centered on the interconnected lives of six characters, starred Perry as Chandler Bing, Aniston as Rachel Green, Cox as Monica Geller, Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay, David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, and Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani.
Per an excerpt shared by The Times, Perry wrote about "crushing badly" on Aniston, in particular, in his memoir. The two actors knew each other prior to "Friends" and Perry said that he was "immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her."
Perry said that he asked out Aniston and she "declined," but said she'd "love to be friends with me."
"I compounded the compound by blurting, 'We can't be friends!'" he wrote.
The actor also said that he found himself overanalyzing his interactions with Aniston.
"Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward," he recalled. "And then I'd ask myself, how long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?"
Although the "17 Again" star wanted to be more than friends with Aniston, they remained platonic and moved past his crush. Perry also recently said that Aniston was the person who reached out "the most" during his addiction battle.
In his memoir, Perry also described Cox as "cripplingly beautiful" and said he knew about Kudrow through a mutual friend, writing, "She was just as gorgeous and hilarious and incredibly smart as my friend had said."
Perry and Aniston stayed friends on and off-screen of their sitcom. They also went on to have highly publicized relationships — Perry with Julia Roberts and Aniston with Brad Pitt, both of whom guest-starred on "Friends."
But their characters did briefly kiss on "Friends," during a flashback at a college party and on a season five episode in which Chandler kissed Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe in an attempt to hide his secret relationship with Monica.