Jennifer Aniston Took Care of the Internal Conflict That 'Would've Destroyed' Friends
Friends had a great 10-year-long run, but that’s largely thanks to Aniston and Schwimmer standing up for their castmates during S3: otherwise, the show could’ve been doomed.
The main actors of Friends are famously all good, well, friends: after spending ten whole years working together on this immensely popular sitcom show, the six primary castmates still have fantastic relationships to this day, and they try to stay in touch with each other as much as possible despite their busy schedules.
It’s not often that everyone’s getting along so nicely, and there was a point in the history of Friends when cracks started forming.
That happened pretty early on, in Season 2, but luckily, the co-stars took care of it. The problem at hand was the pay gap between the more popular and less popular members of the cast.
Starting from S2, when Friends started focusing on Ross and Rachel’s relationship, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston started receiving substantially thicker paychecks than their colleagues. This alarmed both actors who started advocating for equal pay for their friends — they even accepted pay cuts for themselves!
“It would’ve destroyed us, I think, if someone was soaring financially,” Aniston told WSJ.
Starting from Season 3, when Aniston and Schwimmer accepted their pay cuts to stay on par with their co-stars, all six cast members were doing their negotiations together. For the remainder of the show, they were all paid equally for the same job.
“[The negotiations were] more about, ‘We’re doing equal work and we all deserve to be compensated in the same way.' I wouldn’t feel good going to work knowing someone was getting X amount and I was getting something greater,” the actress explained.
She and David Schwimmer were adamant in their approach, and their co-stars were thankful. Matthew Perry specifically pointed out Schwimmer’s generosity in his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
“His decision served to make us take care of each other through what turned out to be a myriad of stressful network negotiations, and it gave us a tremendous amount of power. We had David’s goodness, and his astute business sense, to thank for what we had been offered,” he wrote.
This is a great story about solidarity and caring for each other, isn’t it? That’s exactly what friends are for.
Source: WSJ