Why the ‘Friends’ cast is still close, 14 years later

Show may have ended in 2004, but its stars will always be there for each other

If you look into Lisa Kudrow’s phone, one chat that's likely to get your attention is the one with her Friends co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.

Yes, even 14 years after the trio took their final bows on the sitcom, they're still close, reports E! News. And while most actors go back to their individual lives after wrap up, the women of Friends get together regularly. And they're always trying to get the men — Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer — to join in.

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Noting their disparate lives and shooting schedules, Kudrow joked during a 2015 appearance that they're "constantly" throwing out potential dates. "It's crazy," she said of the six-person coordination. "But it's sweet that we're trying, isn't it?" That same year, the starlet – who played Phoebe Buffay on the hit show – said, "We spent 10 years together, almost every day. We all went through something significant and that's a strong bond. As you get older, you realise you don't have that with just about everybody."

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Right from the start, the sextet was an insular group. Shooting for NBC's Thursday night star attraction was a heady experience for the young, previously-unknown stars. And in a pre-social media world, it was hard to predict the glare that would be directed them. "It's scary, it's jarring, it's not what you thought it would be," Kudrow admitted once. "Thank God there were six of us together at the same time, going through it."

Even early on, some 20 million viewers were tuning in to watch the 20 somethings fumble their way through life in New York. "We're a really tight ensemble, we get along really well,” LeBlanc told Katie Couric back in 1994.

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Perhaps it was the director's desire to have the cast of a show based on friendship be friends in real but the actors all felt obligated to live up to Friends’ premise. "I think it was unspoken but we instinctively felt like we needed to be friends and get along," Kudrow recalled in 2016. "We started playing poker [on set]." Soon, Kudrow, Cox and Aniston were getting together for lunch every single day. “We fell in love with each other and actually wanted to hang out," says Cox, in an old interview.

Of course, that made the end extremely hard. "I actually cried," Kudrow revealed. "When I thought we might not come back, I remember driving home and bursting into tears thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to miss those people.’ And I really do.”

Both she and Perry have gone on-record saying that they should have eked out a few more seasons of the show. "I find myself sort of reminiscing about how much fun it was and the hours that we worked. You know, you can see how much we laughed and everything," Perry revealed during an appearance on Piers Morgan Tonight. "I found myself saying, 'If I had a time machine, I would like to go back to 2004 and not have stopped."

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Kudrow agreed. "If it were up to us, like, individually, I would keep going," she said. "There would have come a time anyway when someone would have said, 'We've had enough’.”

So why not just sign up for a reunion – something fans have been clamoring for ever since the 2004 finale? Ironically, each of the show's six leads have shot the idea down for a myriad of valid reasons.

"Friends was about people in their 20s and 30s, not about people in their 40s or 50s. If we have the same problems then that's just sad. That's not fun!" Kudrow stated during a January appearance on Conan.

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Ultimately, it was co-creator Marta Kaufman who delivered the final clarification. "Friends was about that time in your life when your friends are your family and once you have a family, there's no need anymore,” she said.

But the Friends fanatic in us just won’t let go off the possibility that Rachel, Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Chandler will get together again someday, perhaps in a certain purple apartment. Or a rusty orange couch in a Brooklyn coffee shop would also do.

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