Jennifer Aniston Rejected Matthew Perry’s Advances Years Before ‘Friends’ Premiered

© Provided by Hollywood Life They may be ‘Friends’ now, but Jennifer Aniston rebuffed Matthew Perry’s romantic advances years before the show became famous.

She’d just like to be Friends. According to an excerpt in Matthew Perry‘s new book, Jennifer Aniston rejected her future co-star before the hit NBC sitcom premiered, though he crushed on her even after the show began in 1994. At one point, he called her and attempted to get her attention with two new acting roles. “It was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way,” he wrote in his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, due to hit shelves on November 1. The former Chandler Bing, now 53, also admits in the book that upon meeting her, he was “immediately taken” with the Just Go With It actress, also 53.

According to Page Six, the actor asked her out, but she offered up the time honored “friends” option, instead. “[We] can’t be friends!” he reacted. Still, they seemed to rise above the awkward encounter without any trouble. Matthew wrote that by the time they met up for their first table read of the legendary sitcom, the duo “were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.”

Though Matthew recounts a continuing preoccupation with Jennifer, he recalled eventually overcoming her “deafening lack of interest.” And though the former Rachel Greene shared an iconic romance with Ross, played by David Schwimmer, she did share one onscreen kiss with Matthew during The One with the Flashback. The Mother’s Day star famously went on to marry and then divorce Brad Pitt, while Matthew went on to date Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts, though only for a short time.

The Fools Rush In actor reveals that he suffered from insecurity in that relationship, thinking that he was “certain” she would break things off. “Why would she not?” Matthew continued in the book. “I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”

Matthew was engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz in 2020, but the duo broke up in June 2021.