The director of iconic ’90s sitcom (and my personal fave comfort watch) Friends has confessed he thought one of the show’s most memorable guest stars was “nice… but not funny”.
As a die-hard Friends fan, I’ll defend the show until I’m on my deathbed (and then come back to haunt anyone who has a bad word to say about the show after I’m gone).
However, I must admit I’m with director James Burrow, who, per Daily Mail, has revealed in his new memoir that he didn’t think much of Helen Baxendale, who played Ross Geller’s wife-of-five-seconds, Emily Waltham.
If you cast your mind back to seasons four and five, you’ll remember Emily as the stick-in-the-mud, Britsh bae of David Schwimmer‘s character. The pair wed at the end of the fourth season, even after Ross’ cringeworthy “I take thee, Rachel” blunder at the altar.
Now, 25 years after Baxendale left the show, Burrow dished that trying to work with the actress “was like clapping with one hand”. Ouch.
“She was nice but not particularly funny,” he wrote in Directed by James Burrow. “Schwimmer had no one to bounce off.
“In sitcoms and any type of romantic comedy, the funny is just as important as the chemistry. We discovered that any new girlfriend for Ross needed to be as funny as Rachel [played by Jennifer Aniston].”
Hinting that he might’ve preferred to recast Baxendale, Burrow said getting a new actor in wasn’t always possible “because of tight shooting deadlines or other logistical considerations”.
“You don’t cast anyone to be a straw man, unless it’s for one episode.”
Luckily for him, Baxendale left the sitcom after 14 episodes as she was expecting her first child.
But if we’re really getting into an analysis of Friends and how Emily didn’t have a humorous bone in her body, some could argue that that was the entire point of the Emily-Ross-Rachel love triangle — or Venn diagram, if you will.
At its centre, we’ve got Ross: a bit of a wet blanket, but a funny wet blanket nonetheless. Overlapping with his dryness, you have Emily, and the antithesis to her is Rachel — the comical love interest who eventually prevails. Pure science.
And with that, I’ll be heading off to rewatch Friends for the umpteenth time.
