Here’s Why Matthew Perry Was The Last Friends Star To Be Cast

Throughout Friends’ 10-season tenure and its ’90s nostalgia juggernaut status, fans have wondered what the show would have been like without certain actors. Many celebrities were considered for the iconic roles of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, and Phoebe. However, one of the now-household names almost didn’t get cast. Matthew Perry reveals in his new book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing that he was the last actor to join the cast of Friends.

At that time in the mid-’90s, Perry was attached to “sci-fi comedy” L.A.X. 2194 pilot about futuristic “baggage handlers at Los Angeles International Airport.” Perry asked his agent to secure him an audition for the “hot read of the season” that was originally called Friends Like Us, which his agents said wasn’t possible. “They’ve already measured you for the futuristic shirt and everything.” He writes that when he first read the script for Friends Like Us, it was like “someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life. One character in particular stood out to me: it wasn’t that I thought I could play ‘Chandler,’ I was Chandler.”

His portrayal of Chandler almost didn’t come to be though. According to Perry’s book, his friend Craig Bierko was also auditioning for the role. Bierko told Perry and Hank Azaria, who auditioned to be Joey twice, that he was offered roles in Best Friends and Friends. Azaria and Perry told Bierko to accept the role of Chandler, unanimously agreeing it was the better offer of the two. However, Bierko chose Best Friends — much to Perry’s shock — where he was the lead. Bustle reached out to Craig Bierko for comment and did not hear back at the time of publication.

Perry then knew he had to get out of L.A.X. 2194, which still hadn’t gotten picked up, and was able to still audition for Chandler. In the audition process, he read for Marta Kauffman on a Wednesday and said he broke “all the rules” by not carrying the script with him. “You’re supposed to carry the script with you when you read, because that way, you’re acknowledging to the writers that it’s just a work in progress” he explains.

“But I knew the script so well by this point,” from practicing with his friends, he adds. “Of course, I nailed it. Thursday, I read for the production company, and nailed it, and Friday I read for the network. Nailed it again. I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit.”

By getting laughs when no one else had, Perry secured his position in the cast of Friends. “And Chandler was born,” he writes. “This was my part now and there was no stopping it. The pilot season of 1994 had cast its final actor: Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing.”