"How can you not have a crush on Jenny?"
Matthew Perry wanted to be more than just friends with Jennifer Aniston.
The Friends star, whose buzzy memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing hits shelves Nov. 1, opens up in a new interview about having crushes on all three of his female costars at different points throughout filming the beloved sitcom. Speaking to Diane Sawyer for ABC News, Perry also recalls how Aniston turned down his advances before they ever shared the screen.
"Well, how can you not have a crush on Jenny? And Courteney [Cox]? And Lisa [Kudrow]?" Perry says in a preview clip from the hourlong interview, which will air Friday night. "It made it kind of difficult to go to work, because I had to pretend that I didn't."
Perry's affinity for Aniston made it difficult for him to look away while they were filming together. "I was like, 'Is three seconds too long? How long is…?'" he says. "And then I write in the gratitude part [of the book] about her letting me do that."
In his book, Perry recalls that he and Aniston first met about three years before Friends, through mutual acquaintances. "I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued, too — maybe it was going to be something," Perry writes. "Back then I got two jobs in one day — one was Haywire, an America's Funniest Home Videos-type show, and the other was a sitcom. So I called Jennifer and I said, 'You're the first person I wanted to tell this to!'"
But Perry quickly realized it was a "bad idea" he would soon regret. "Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much or in the wrong kind of way… and I only compounded the error by then asking her out," he writes. "She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she'd love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, 'We can't be friends!'"
As fate would have it, the two found themselves becoming friends once again, and Perry was forced to reckon with his feelings. "Fairly early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston," he writes. "Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I'd ask myself, How long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?"
But time heals all wounds, and Perry writes that slowly, the "shadow" of his crush "disappeared in the hot glow of the show" as its popularity skyrocketed. "That, and her deafening lack of interest."
Perry's full interview with Sawyer airs tonight, Oct. 28, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC. It will be available to stream on Hulu beginning Saturday. Watch a clip from the interview above.
