Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing and Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay in “Friends” Photo: YouTube screenshott
Like so many Friends fans — and characters — Lisa Kudrow says she initially thought the joke-cracking character Chandler Bing was gay.
It was a running joke in the beloved ’90s sitcom’s early days that the character, played by the late Matthew Perry, was frequently mistaken for gay, causing him no end of hilarious anxiety. But in real life, Kudrow apparently made the same assumption about Perry’s character.
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In a recent interview with Conan O’Brien on the comedian’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the Comeback star said that upon reading an early Friends script, “I went, ‘Oh, they have a gay character, that’s good.’ That’s all I heard.”
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“And so at the table read,” she continued, “I just did a double take at him. I never even in a million years could have envisioned anyone playing the character like that and with his own rhythm and everything. It’s his own.”
Perry, who died last October, certainly made the character his own. As writer Matt Baume noted in a 2021 piece for LGBTQ Nation on Chandler’s ambiguously gay evolution, early in the show’s development, Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane, who is himself gay, spoke in 1990s interviews about the fact that they originally “entertained the possibility that Chandler could be gay.”
Baume’s 2021 video essay, “The Straightening of Chandler Bing,” delves into all the tiny hints and vestigial jokes in the show’s pilot that point to that original version of the character — including a throwaway line in which Chandler mentions dreaming that he was performing in drag as Liza Minnelli.
Ultimately, though, Crane reportedly explained that casting a straight actor in the role changed everything, and if the creators had cast a gay actor they might have stuck with their initial conception of Chandler as gay.
Instead, Baume wrote, Friends’ writers decided to have the show’s characters think Chandler was gay. Writers were told to “write it gay and play it straight.”
“It would have been a huge milestone if the creators of Friends had gone ahead and made one of the friends gay,” Baume wrote. “It was such a popular show — if it could compel millions of Americans to change their hairstyles, imagine what it might have done to public attitudes about homosexuality.”
