A look back (and ahead?) at ‘Friends’
Courteney Cox admits to being a little bit jealous of the girls from “Sex and the City” and their leap to the big screen.
“I wish we could do that with ‘Friends,’” Cox says. “The thing is, the characters from ‘Sex and the City’ hopped all over Manhattan. On ‘Friends,’ we were always stuck in the apartment and that coffeehouse.”
Nevertheless, Cox says “Friends” castmate Jennifer Aniston has a great idea for a movie that would reunite the members of the long-running NBC sitcom. And, judging from her enthusiasm, Cox would clearly love to make such a movie happen, if only to enjoy working with everyone again. But she’s not getting her hopes up.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” she says, tamping down expectations, including her own. “Would [series creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman] want to write it? Because they’d have to be involved. I don’t know … a lot of things would have to break just right for it to work. But we’ve daydreamed about it.”
And while we’re on the subject of “Friends”— and it’s a topic Cox takes to with hearty enthusiasm — here are a few of her favorite things about her decade on the show:
Favorite ritual: “Jennifer and Lisa [Kudrow] and I ate lunch together every single day for 10 years. And we always had the same thing — a Cobb salad. But it wasn’t really a Cobb salad. It was a Cobb salad that Jennifer doctored up with turkey bacon and garbanzo beans and I don’t know what. She just has a way with food, which really helps. Because if you’re going to eat the same salad every day for 10 years, it’d better be a good salad, right?”
Favorite scene: “Off the top of my head, I’d say when Monica proposed to Chandler. There’s like 10,000 candles lit in the apartment and she gets down on one knee and starts sobbing. ‘There’s a reason why girls don’t do this!’ That was a big scene to me, playing the heavy emotion of that.”
Favorite part of Monica: “I loved any time she got super-competitive. The New Year’s Rockin’ Eve dance. The Thanksgiving touch football game with Ross. Fat Monica too. God, playing Fat Monica was so freeing! I remember being in [Fat Monica] makeup one time waiting for the other cast members to come out, and [director] Kevin Bright put on ‘Shake Your Groove Thing’ and I just grabbed a doughnut and started dancing like crazy in front of the audience. I could do anything because I was hidden under all that prosthetic makeup.”
—Glenn Whipp