I think any Millennial would agree that TV low-key peaked in the ’90s. So many popular shows from that era still hold so much rewatch value, but learning more about what went on behind-the-scenes might change the way you see your favorite throwback series!
Here are 50 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about iconic ’90s TV shows:
1.
At the Television Critics Association’s 2015 press tour, John Stamos admitted that rumors he tried to get Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen fired from Full House were true — and he temporarily succeeded! He said, “It’s sort of true that the Olsen twins cried a lot. It was very difficult to get the shot. So I [said], ‘Get them out…!’ That is actually 100 percent accurate. They brought in a couple of unattractive redheaded kids. We tried that for a while, and that didn’t work. [Producers] were like, all right, get the Olsen twins back. And that’s the story.”
2.
According to Collider, Lori Loughlin was only supposed to play Rebecca Donaldson on Full House for six episodes. However, her chemistry with John Stamos — along with the rest of the cast — and her popularity spurred producers to make her a permanent fixture. Becky famously joined the Tanner household, marrying Uncle Jesse in Season 4.
Many viewers wanted them to be together in real life, and John told HuffPost Live that they “actually did date” years before the show. He said, “We went on a date to Disneyland before we were both married. In real life, when we were 18, 19 years old. No disrespect to her family and her husband now, I would say that she could be the one that got away. She’s one of my dearest friends, and that’s good enough. I really do adore her.”
3.
Initially, Steve Urkel was supposed to be a one-off character on Family Matters. Series creator Michael Warren even named him after a real-life friend as a joke. However, Urkel increased ratings, so production mandated that he appear in every episode. He helped make the show a massive hit. Michael told the LA Times, “I think the only person who is not a fan of Family Matters is my friend Steve Urkel. It has terribly affected his life.”
4.
Saved by the Bell costars Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Elizabeth Berkley dated at some point during filming, which he confirmed in 2019. He told Entertainment Tonight, “We dated. If you want to call it dating, sure. You’re in an environment, you know how it is when you’re working on a set, and we were young, I mean, we were young. There’s no one around, really. I mean, you work and live in a bubble. You’re in LA, right? You’re in your cars, and you come to set, and you do your work, and you’re with these beautiful women, and then you go back in your car. You’re not going to school, so you don’t have a lot of choices. People say, ‘Well, didn’t you go out?’ Not really.”
Mark-Paul also dated Lark Voorhies for three years. He told People, “All of us dated at one point or another—it was incestuous! Sometimes the girls would gang up on the guys. Tiffani and Elizabeth would hate me, and then they’d hate Lark because Lark was talking to me, and Mario was supposed to side with someone. All that stuff you did in high school, like, ‘How could you talk to him?'”
And Mark-Paul reportedly had a mutual crush on Tiffani Thiessen! Costar Ed Alonzo told Entertainment Tonight, “They kinda liked each other a bit. They liked each other a lot. It was very cute. It was hand-holding and looking over.”
5.
Tiffani Thiessen dated Mario Lopez during their time at Bayside High. In his memoir Just Between Us, he reportedly wrote, “I thought that being loyal to Tiffani was the right thing to do. But I can’t say that I was capable at that age of following through on my noble intentions.”
6.
After living large off the success of “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” Will Smith ended up broke when his next album flopped. He also didn’t pay his taxes, so the IRS took a lot of his expensive cars and such. However, his then-girlfriend encouraged him to network at The Arsenio Hall Show, where he met Benny Medina, who pitched him the idea for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
7.
At a house party, Quincy Jones had Will do an impromptu audition for the top NBC execs, which impressed the onlookers so much that the contract for him to star in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was drawn up that night. In a YouTube video, Will said, “We took a picture, and we signed the basic deal for Fresh Prince, and three months later, we were shooting the pilot, and that’s the story of how I became the Prince of Bel-Air.”
8.
In his memoir Will, Will Smith revealed that he asked out Karyn Parsons, who played his cousin on Fresh Prince. However, she rejected him. He wrote, “[Karyn] was smart enough to tell me ‘hell no’ when I tried to explain that we were not really cousins, so it would be fine if we dated. Telling her, ‘I swear it won’t mess up our working relationship.’ She knew better than that — good call, K.P.”
9.
Every time Jazz was thrown out of the Banks’ house, they used the exact same footage. In his memoir, Will Smith wrote, “The interior of the Bel-Air mansion and the exterior are two different locations, and we only had a one-day shoot at the exterior location. So, we had to use the same shot of [DJ Jazzy] Jeff being thrown out over and over. Therefore, any time you see Jeff enter with the brown-and-white Aztec patterned shirt, you know that he’ll be thrown out in that scene.”
10.
In 2015, Gillian Anderson told the Guardian that there were “definitely periods” where she and her The X-Files costar David Duchovny “hated each other.” She added, “Hate is too strong a word. We didn’t talk for long periods of time. It was intense, and we were both pains in the arse for the other at various times… I’m not going to get into it. I’m not even going to begin to get into that. But we are closer today than we ever have been.”
11.
The X-Files Season 4 episode “Home” stirred so much controversy that it was banned. In this episode, the discovery of the body of a baby with birth defects leads Mulder and Scully to investigate a family who are suspected of incest. After it aired, the negative feedback was so strong that Fox pulled the episode and didn’t broadcast it again for three years. They later paired it with an ad that said, “Only on Halloween would we dare air an episode so controversial it’s been banned from television for three years. Consider yourself warned.” It was the only episode of the series to be given a TV-MA rating.
12.
On The Howard Stern Show, Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander revealed that Danny DeVito was offered the role of George Costanza. Theorizing why he turned it down, Jason said, “His career, when we started Seinfeld, would’ve been at its apex. So, he probably didn’t wanna do a sidekick role.”
Jason also said that Chris Rock turned down the role of George on Seinfeld. He said, “Why Chris wouldn’t do it, I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t get to an offer stage. I don’t know.”
13.
Heidi Swedberg’s Seinfeld character Susan was killed off because the rest of the cast thought she was “impossible” to play off of. On the Howard Stern Show, Jason Alexander said, “Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring… Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] actually said, ‘Don’t you want to just kill her?’ And Larry [David] went, ‘Ka-bang!'”
However, Jason later apologized for how he told that story, tweeting, “OK, folks, I feel officially awful. The impetus for telling this story was that Howard said, ‘Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me you all wanted to kill her.’ So I told the story to try and clarify that no one wanted to kill Heidi… [She] was generous and gracious, and I am so mad at myself for retelling this story in any way that would diminish her. If I had had more maturity or more security in my own work, I surely would have taken her query and possibly tried to adjust the scenes with her. She surely offered. But, I didn’t have that maturity or security.”
14.
Lawrence Tierney, who played Elaine’s father on one episode of Seinfeld, was never brought back because the rest of the cast found him intimidating and scary. In a Season 2 DVD extra, Julia Louis-Dreyfus said, “It’s too bad he was so cuckoo because I’m sure he would’ve been back otherwise.” Jason Alexander said, “There was every reason in the world to have that be an ongoing character because there was just so much tension between him and every other character. It was brilliant.”
However, the cast went on to describe an incident where Lawrence allegedly stole one of Jerry’s knives from the set and hid it in his jacket. After Jerry Seinfeld called him out on it, Lawrence tried to make a joke then pulled the knife out, made the Psycho sound, and advanced on Jerry a bit. Jason added, “Lawrence Tierney, I think, scared the living crap out of all of us.”
15.
HBO first offered the role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City to Dana Delany, but she turned it down for fear of being pigeonholed because she “had done a movie called Live Nude Girls with Kim Cattrall that was somewhat similar.” She told the LA Times, “It was very much in the early stages, and I had just done Nude Girls and Exit to Eden, and I just said to Darren [Starr], ‘I cannot do a show with ‘sex’ in the title.'”
Then the studio had a contract with Lisa Edelstein. She told Access Hollywood, “I was either going to do it or not. It all depended on whether [Sarah Jessica Parker] said yes. My contract was complete. I was waiting.” After losing out on the role, she “didn’t really watch” the series because it was “too painful.”
16.
The iconic red Baywatch swimsuits were designed not by a wardrobe designer but by a competition swimwear company. Series co-creator Gregory J. Bonann told Yahoo Sports, “TYR designed the suit per my specs. [It] had to look good on the women, but had to also be functional in the water. The now-famous ‘slo-mo’ shooting … required good support on the top and minimal creep in the back. … All lifeguards, not almost all, but all lifeguards, come from a competitive swimming background. That means that all of these women grew up in one-piece swimsuits, not bikinis.”
He continued, “The obvious goal was to replicate, as closely as possible, what the actual lifeguard women wear. When in the water, in big surf, with multiple victims grabbing onto your hair, suit, arms, legs, etc., they could — and do — easily rip off your swimsuit if they are desperate enough. A two-piece for women would be just too risky to wear in the water with a victim grabbing, scratching, kicking, and screaming.”
17.
In the Everybody Loves Raymond pilot, Raymond’s twin sons were named Gregory and Matthew after his real-life twin boys. However, the characters’ names were changed to Geoffrey and Michael. They were played by Sawyer and Sullivan Sweeten.
18.
Sawyer and Sullivan’s big sister, Madylin, played their onscreen sister Ally. Her character is named after Ray Romano’s daughter.
19.
James Van Der Beek improvised the Dawson’s Creek “crying face” moment that has since become a huge meme. In 2012, he told HuffPost, “It wasn’t scripted, I don’t think. I mean, it was appropriate for the scene. You know, it was just high drama; you’ve been living with this character for a while, and a scene like that just kind of drops in your lap, and you just lose it. They yell cut and say, ‘Oh my god. That was amazing!’ So I remember being completely surprised by it because it was completely sincere. The fact that it’s being used to mock me now, I think it’s so funny.”
20.
Topanga Lawrence was only supposed to be on one episode of Boy Meets World, but Danielle Fishel “came in and killed it, and then it changed the whole show.” At ’90s Con 2022, Danielle said, “Yeah, it was only supposed to be, I think, one episode — possibly a recurring — and then she basically became the rest of the show.”
21.
When Topanga spontaneously hacked off her hair in Boy Meets World Season 4, Danielle Fishel was “thrilled” to cut it herself. On a 2024 episode of Pod Meets World, she said, “I had wanted to do it all summer. The reason we did the episode is because I had called [series creator Michael Jacobs] the beginning of summer and said, ‘I wanna cut my hair. Can I cut it?’ And he said, ‘At least let me write an episode for it.’ So, I had to wait all summer. So, by the time we got to it, I had been ready to cut my hair for months.”
During filming, she faked the cut several times to practice, with director Jeff McCracken shouting, “Stop!” Danielle continued, “I remember Michael coming out and going, ‘Show me where you’re gonna cut. Show me. Show me where.’ … Because he did not want it to be too short. And he knew I had control because I was gonna be the one with the scissors. So, he wanted to know. I wanted it a little shorter. I knew he wanted it a little longer. And so, yes, it was a very intense day.”
22.
On their joint podcast Pod Meets World, Danielle Fishel told her Boy Meets World costar Rider Strong that she’d had a crush on him. She said, “I think it started maybe later in Season 1 and definitely through Season 2.”
23.
In Boy Meets World Season 6, Mr. Feeny married Dean Bolander, who was played by William Daniels’s real-life wife, Bonnie Bartlett Daniels. They worked together frequently throughout their careers. In 2019, Bonnie told Today, “We worked for so long on St. Elsewhere because we played man and wife on that, and won Emmys and all kinds of stuff … And we had worked together when we were kids. We’ve been together for 68 years, so we’ve worked a lot together.”
24.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch never would’ve made it off the ground without Melissa Joan Hart’s mom, Paula Hart. In 2016, Melissa told Marie Claire, “I produced the movie with my mom first and then we spun it off for the series, so I was the boss and the star, which was a nice place to be. Not just an actor for hire but a voice in the production as well. My mom doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her job as the woman spearheading the show. She is the one who was handed the Archie Comic book on a playground at my sister’s school in Manhattan and sold it to Viacom as a Showtime movie. She always knew it would make an incredible series, but no one would listen until she cut together a trailer from the movie and pitched it to all four major networks at the time.”
“She got three offers in the room for the series, and we decided ABC was the right home because we were fans of the TGIF lineup and felt it was the right place for our show. But even once the show was on the air, the network didn’t really support it the first season. They were counting on Clueless the show to be the big hit; we were just the little show that would follow that. But we ended up being the fan favorite and held our spot on that network (even forcing Everybody Loves Raymond to move to a different night of the week) for four years until we moved to WB for the final three seasons,” she said.
25.
According to Screen Rant, one of the animatronic cars used for Salem Saberhagen in Sabrina the Teenage Witch was originally used for Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus. Nick Bakay, who voiced Salem, told Vanity Fair, “ABC did not love the animatronic cat. And I get it: it’s not like it was going to fool anyone. But I think that it was part of the charm of the show — quaint, old-school, practical magic and weird cat puppets. And for some reason, it kind of worked.”
26.
When Felicity Porter infamously cut her hair short in Felicity Season 2, the stylist started Keri Russell’s haircut for real. The actor later went to a real salon to have it finished. At the 2018 ATX TV Festival, Keri said, “The way it all totally went down was they were wrapping up the first season…and the hair people were putting away everything they had into boxes, and there was a little boy’s wig. We put it on me at like 2 in the morning as a joke…and we took a Polaroid, and over the summer, we thought it’d be really funny to send to J.J. [Abrams] and Matt [Reeves] and say, ‘I cut my hair — hope you like it.’ Totally as a joke…”
She continued, “I was with my girlfriends at some lake, and I got this phone call…and [J.J.] said, ‘Hey, we got your picture.’ No laughing. No nothing. ‘Would you really cut your hair?’ And I was like, ‘I guess?’ … We shot that scene at like 4 a.m. on a Friday. And the hair girl actually…it’s in slow motion, like her cutting my hair, sniping it. And then a few hours later, I went to a hair salon, and someone cut the rest of it off.”
27.
In 2014, Jennie Garth confirmed longstanding rumors of an on-set feud with her Beverly Hills, 90210 costar Shannen Doherty to E! News. She said, “We were locked in this sound stage for 14-16 hours every day. There were times when we loved each other, and there were times when we wanted to claw each other’s eyes out.” In her book Deep Thoughts From a Hollywood Blonde, Jennie added, “It was more of just young girls finding their way and finding their individual voices. Shannen and I are both Aries women, we’re both very strong, independent women, so we butt heads a lot. Now, as grown women, we happen to get along as well.”
Then, on Celebrity Lie Detector in 2015, Tori Spelling admitted that tensions between Shannen Doherty and the rest of the cast were high. Describing the incident that was the last straw, Tori said, “Shannen runs in and sits down to get [her] hair done, and you could just feel everyone was turning and looking. I knew someone was gonna say something.” Shannen got into a “heated fight” with Ian Ziering, who allegedly told her, “You are a C-U-N-T: Can’t Understand Normal Thinking.” Afterwards, the cast banded together to get Shannen fired, so Tori brought the issue to her dad, series creator Aaron Spelling.
Tori said, “I felt like I was a part of something, a movement, that cost someone their livelihood… Was she a horrible person? No. She was one of the best friends I ever had.” However, she felt she made the right decision “in the workplace, as a coworker.”
28.
Dolly Parton coproduced Buffy the Vampire Slayer through Sandollar Productions, the production company she cofounded — and she was actually “very involved” with the series! She told Business Insider, “A lot of my work was done just conversing back and forth with the business people there. And I’d go out for meetings now and then.”
Because she lived in Nashville, she wasn’t on set very often and didn’t meet the cast, but she sent them gifts. She said, “I didn’t get to meet all of the people, but I wanted them to know that I was there for them, I was proud of them, and they were doing a great job… I was very excited about the show. That little show did great.”
29.
Ryan Reynolds was reportedly offered the role of Xander Harris on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he declined. He told the Star, “I love that show, and I loved Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, but my biggest concern was that I didn’t want to play a guy in high school. I had just come out of high school, and it was fucking awful.”
30.
The role of Xander Harris ultimately went to Nicholas Brendon. When Xander was split into two people in Season 3, his twin brother, Kelly Donovan, guest-starred as his other half. Nicholas did most of the acting and speaking for both roles, but Kelly acted as a body double. He also had a few lines when both halves of Xander needed to speak directly to each other.
31.
Spike wasn’t meant to be Buffy’s love interest on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and James Marsters’s popularity with the audience allegedly angered series creator Joss Whedeon so much that he pushed the actor into a wall. James told the podcast Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, “In Joss’s world, evil is not cool, and I really respect him for that. Vampire were just a metaphor for the challenges that you get over in your adolescence. So vampires are supposed to be overcome, and he got talked into one sexy vampire that’s not gonna be killed off. That was Angel. And I was supposed to come in and get killed off. And the audience immediately reacted to me in a way that was gonna make it very difficult to kill me off. And the network was telling him, ‘Oh my God, keep this guy in the show’ and all of that. I was basically ruining his show.”
He continued, “But the thing is that that [decision] is gonna change the show from being about a teenager overcoming adolescence into a show where those problems are kinda sexy, aren’t they? All this psychotic…I was killing people all the time! I was shredding them! And the audience was going, ‘Oh, we want more of that,’ and Joss is like, ‘No, no, the point is that you overcome the evil! That’s the point.’ So, if I was in his shoes, I would’ve killed me off. I wouldn’t have pushed me against the wall. I just would’ve killed him off immediately, saying, ‘I know I told you five episodes. We’ll pay you for five, but you’re dead after two, sorry.'”
“He just got frustrated and figured it out, but there was that day when he pushed me up against the wall. I don’t remember how it started. I just have this image of him, and he’s in my face. He goes, ‘I don’t care how popular you are, kid. You are dead. You are dead. You are dead. You got me?’ …I just said, ‘It’s your football, dude. You gotta do what you wanna do,'” James said.
32.
Playing Spike on Buffy did serious damage to James Marsters’s hair. The label bottle of bleach he used to get Spike’s signature platinum shade warned that it should only be used every six weeks, but he “did it every eight days, because a vampire is dead, so your hair doesn’t grow, so you can’t have roots.” In 2016, he told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “They told me repeatedly my hair would fall out or rather they were not sure I would have hair by the end…The makeup department was really particular: There can never be roots in your hair. So for seven years, we did it every episode. I agreed to bleaching when I thought I was going to die in five episodes. I don’t know if I would have agreed to it for seven years.”
33.
According to the book Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, to keep the identity of Laura Palmer’s murderer under wraps, the cast and crew were given fake scripts, and two alternate reveals were shot.
34.
Julianna Margulies’s ER character, Carol Hathaway, wasn’t supposed to last beyond the first episode. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Julianna said, “Honestly, I owe my career to George Clooney. I do…I seriously owe my career to George Clooney because my character died in the pilot of ER, and I was about to sign onto a not very good sitcom, ’cause I came back to New York. I needed a job. And he called me out of the blue, kind of put his neck out on the line for me, and said, ‘I overheard that your character tested well, and if I were you, I wouldn’t take another job, because I think they’re gonna bring you back to life.'”
Carol became Doug Ross’s main love interest because of the chemistry between Julianna and George. She told People, “That can’t happen if you don’t have a crush on each other. And with George and me, it was so organic. I was just supposed to be a guest star, number 39 on the call sheet. But he treated everyone the same.”
35.
The Nanny costume designer Brenda Cooper spent eight to ten hours a day shopping for Fran Fine’s iconic wardrobe — even for pieces that only appeared on screen one time. However, she took things a step further, altering and combining garments to create totally unique looks. She told HuffPost, “Every week I had a team of seamstresses in the fittings ― we would be cutting, trimming, pinning. I would be ripping off sleeves, adding sleeves. There was a lot of creative stuff that went on to pump up the volume.”
36.
On I’ll Fly Away, Jeremy London played Nathan Bedford for two seasons, but his twin brother, Jason London, took over the role for the 90-minute series finale. The show was canceled before shooting on the finale began, and Jeremy had already booked Angel Falls. Ironically, Jason was initially cast as Nathan in the original series but let the part go to Jeremy because he was busy filming a movie.
37.
Shannen Doherty was allegedly fired from Charmed because of an ultimatum Alyssa Milano gave producers. On Shannen’s podcast Let’s Be Clear, costar Holly Marie Combs said, “[Producer Jonathan Levin] said, you know, ‘We’re basically in a position where it’s one or the other. We were told [by Alyssa] that it’s [Shannen] or me, and Alyssa has threatened to sue us for a hostile workplace environment.'” She also said Alyssa allegedly “built a case for herself,” bringing a mediator in to document all the instances she felt uncomfortable.
During a MegaCon panel, Alyssa denied her costars’ allegations. She said, “I’m the most sad that a show that has meant so much to so many people has been tarnished by a toxicity that is still to this day, almost a quarter of a century later, still happening. And I’m sad that people can’t move past it. And I’m sad that we all can’t just celebrate the success of a show that meant so much to all of us.”
Later, on Instagram, Alyssa added, “This was so long ago that any retelling of these stories from anyone is just revisionist history. I will add, though, with absolute certainty—everything was documented. There was a professional mediator (I was told Holly and Shannen would not participate in any mediation) and an on-set producer/babysitter who were both brought in to investigate all claims. It was then recommended by this mediator, after collecting testimony from cast AND crew — what changes should be made if the show was going to continue. The studio, Aaron Spelling, and network made the decision to protect the international hit that was Charmed. I did not have the power to get anyone fired. Once Shannen left we had five more successful seasons and I am forever grateful.”
38.
Wilson Cruz’s My So-Called Life character, Rickie Vasquez, was important to him as a young gay man. In 2019, he told Variety, ” I went in [to the audition] kind of dressed like Rickie. I put on these bright red Levi’s and a rainbow shirt. I sprayed my hair to the hilt. I put on eyeliner. When I got there, there were three or four guys going for the same part, but they were wearing khakis and a polo. I thought, ‘Boy, did you guys miss the mark on this one.’ So when I walked in and met with [casting director] Mary Goldberg, it felt really personal to me.”
“We went through the scene. There wasn’t a lot in the pilot, because I didn’t say a lot. Mary looked at me like, ‘Thank you.’ I started to well up. I walked to the door to leave, not knowing if I was going to come back or not. I turned around and said to her, ‘Before I go, please do me a favor and tell Winnie Holzman, this would have meant so much to me when I was 16 years old to see this guy on TV,'” he said.
39.
And landing the role of Rickie is what spurred Wilson to come out. He told Variety, “My agent sent me the script, and she didn’t necessarily know that I was gay. I read it, and I had to decide whether or not I wanted to disclose to her. I waited. I had made a deal with myself that I would come out if the series went. I wanted people to know that I, as a gay man — a gay boy at the time — really put my stamp of approval to what we were doing. So that’s when I told my parents, and that’s when I was kicked out… I lived on friends’ couches and in my car until we started filming the series. I remember we were with Winnie on our way to something, and I told her what had happened with my dad. Months later, I get this script where Rickie goes through a very similar thing. When I look back on that whole experience, I think of my fictional world and my reality converging. It was cathartic.”
40.
Freaks and Geeks actor Busy Philipps told Vanity Fair, “Paul [Feig] and Judd [Apatow] awkwardly tried to talk to Linda [Cardellini] and me about how, now that we’re on a TV show, we shouldn’t think about losing weight, which had never even occurred to me. They were like, ‘Don’t get crazy now — don’t think you have to be an actress that’s really skinny.’ And I was reading things in the press about how we were the anti-Dawson’s Creek. There was one quote I remember very clearly, like, ‘You won’t find any pretty people on Freaks and Geeks.’ That was interesting as a 19-year-old girl to read. We were not standard packaging.”
41.
While filming the Friends episode “The One Where Ross Got High,” Matt LeBlanc accidentally ate some of David Schwimmer’s regurgitated trifle (which was really bananas and whipped cream). On The Graham Norton Show, Matt said, “There was too much on his plate. So he starts to eat it all, and he starts laughing, and we cut. We’re cutting, and he spits it back on his plate. I’m sitting right next to him, and I’m looking the other way. I didn’t see him spit it back on his plate. So, I take his plate…and I scrape some on my plate… We go again, and now I’m eating it. We finish the take. No one says anything to me.”
42.
While filming the Friends episode “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder. He told Jimmy Kimmel Live, “It was the second scene, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Chandler and I are fighting over the big down chair. I’m downstage at the table, and he comes in the door. And we both look at each other, look at the chair, and neither one of us is sitting in it, so we both, like, race to the chair. And I have to just step over the coffee table and land in this big, huge, comfortable chair. I don’t even think it qualifies as a stunt. And somehow, I ended up completely upside down. And I was gonna land on my head between the table and the chair, so I put my arm up to break my fall and just exploded my shoulder.”
He added, “I did a few episodes in a sling. And they wrote it into the show as Joey was jumping on the bed.”
43.
Initially, Courteney Cox auditioned for and got the part of Rachel Green in Friends. However, realizing she wasn’t right for the role, she convinced NBC to let her play Monica Gellar instead, and Jennifer Aniston took over as Rachel.
44.
On Friends: The Reunion, David Schwimmer revealed that he had a crush on his onscreen love interest, Jennifer Aniston. And then, Jennifer told David, “It was reciprocated.”
She also said, “I just remember saying one time to David, ‘It’s going to be such a bummer if the first time you and I actually kiss is going to be on national television. Sure enough, first time we kissed was in that coffee shop. So, we just channeled all of our love and adoration for each other into Ross and Rachel.”
45.
The style aesthetic that Friends wardrobe designer Debra McGuire created was actually the opposite of the baggy clothes that were considered trendy at the time. She told Vogue India, “Oversized unstructured silhouettes were trending back then, but that was too unflattering for television. Also, I did not want the characters to only be in jeans all the time. New York was changing, and I wanted them to reflect that.”
46.
Debra used some of her personal clothes to dress Rachel Green, such as her hot pink faux fur coat and Missoni trousers. Rachel even sported several monochrome outfits from the stylist’s clothing line.
47.
Friends executive producer Marta Kauffman told the costume designer that the characters should be in jeans because they were hanging out in New York, but she disagreed and decided to go for looks that were aspirational instead. She told High Snobiety, “It was all about texture and color and staying true to a New York palette. It was very black, white, gray, with hits of color.”
48.
Debra McGuire assigned each of the Friends main characters their own palette. The women were divided into colors, and the men were divided into textures. She told the Guardian, “Monica was black, gray, white, burgundy; Rachel was blues and greens… Ross was tweedy, Chandler had a lot of vintage and racing stripe shirts, Joey had leather jackets, then later sweaters and chenille. Phoebe was in patterns.”
49.
Lisa Kudrow was already playing Ursula on Mad About You when she booked the role of Phoebe Buffay on Friends, so NBC approved executive producer David Crane’s idea to introduce Ursula as Phoebe’s twin sister. Ironically, Lisa’s real-life sister, Helena, served as her body double when they needed to shoot scenes with both Phoebe and Ursula on Friends.
50.
And finally, Friends, Phoebe was originally supposed to end up with David, not Mike. When David went to Minsk, actor Hank Azaria “didn’t know that was the end of David.” He told HuffPost, “The plan always was kind of to bring him back. I think, honestly, what happened was Paul Rudd is so awesome that they sort of found a groove with him, and [my character] became more of just the grist for that mill. As opposed to the other way around…It actually did sting a little bit. Whatever part of me is David the science guy who went to Minsk, which admittedly is probably a small part of me, but that part of me wanted to end up with Phoebe. So I was sort of sad when I didn’t…[Paul] certainly has gone on to prove that he was comedically deserving of Phoebe’s love.”
Linda added, “They didn’t want us to look like people in other shows — which you don’t really know how to take. It was comforting on one hand, and not so much on the other.”
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