One of the actors on Friends made an admission about the impact it had on her attempt to live a normal life.
When you appear on one of the biggest comedies of all time, it’s going to shake up your life a bit and turn you into someone people are going to recognise in plenty of countries.
If your character is getting in the way of a very popular relationship on a show like Friends, then it’s going to be all the more difficult.
Helen Baxendale played Emily, one of the multiple women Ross (David Schwimmer) marries and divorces over the course of Friends, for 14 episodes of the show.
After she left the show, she told the Daily Mail she had ‘great fun’ being part of the cast of Friends, even if her time on the show was relatively brief, saying: “I was just there so they could make some funny jokes about England. And I was also expecting, and you have to be thin out in America.”
Baxendale left Friends earlier than planned as she had a baby on the way, but she did reveal that the fame that came with such a role was a bit much.
She said: “You couldn’t walk down the street to buy a pint of milk. In fact, you couldn’t go anywhere. It was impossible to mix with the crowd, and do what ordinary people do.
“I saw it as a gilded prison. It was something I wasn’t prepared for.”
While she had fun being on the show, she reckoned ‘fame just didn’t fit in with my life’.
Of course, she was on the show so that Ross could realise he still wasn’t properly over Rachel, as he got all the way to the altar with Emily, only for the dingus to say ‘I Ross, take thee Rachel’ right to his bride-to-be’s face.
It’s yet another brick in the gargantuan wall of Ross being the absolute worst person on Friends, resulting in him getting a well deserved punch to the stomach after actually going through with the ceremony.
As you can imagine, Ross and Emily didn’t last very long at all after he said another woman’s name at the altar and that was it for poor Emily, discarded on the scrapheap of romantic false leads created so TV shows can string out the tension between the couple you know are destined to get together.
Baxendale ended up being on the receiving end of some criticism from Friends director James Burrows in his 2022 memoir Directed by James Burrows: Five Decades of Stories from the Legendary Director of Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, and More.
Writing about ‘The One With All The Rugby’, the director claimed that Baxendale was ‘nice but not particularly funny’, saying he thought she didn’t really have chemistry with Schwimmer.
“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.
“Often, you can’t recast, 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.”
Of course, that’s just his opinion and plenty of Friends fans liked Emily, unfortunate as she was for being an obstacle between Ross and Rachel’s dynamic, while for some viewers Ross is pretty much history’s greatest monster.
