We all thought Rachel Green and Ross Gellar were the will-they, won't-they to pay attention to on Friends, but turns out, it was Jen and David, too. During the Friends reunion on HBO Max that dropped 3 a.m. ET Thursday, Jennifer Aniston confirmed she and co-star David Schwimmer were "crushing hard" on one another back in the day.
Host James Corden asked if any of the cast dated, and Aniston turns to David and says, “Umm, I mean well, David..."
“Yeah the first season, we, I, had a major crush on Jen,” David responded.
“It was reciprocated,” Jen said.
“And at some point we were both crushing hard on each other, but it was like two ships passing because one of us was always in a relationship, and we never crossed that boundary. We respected that, but we both…”
This is when Matt LaBlanc, the MVP of the reunion, fake-coughed and said "Bullshit." (Frankly, that's more of a Chandler line, but you love to see LeBlanc lay out some snark.) "I'm kidding!" he said.
“Honestly, I remember saying one time to David, it’s gonna be such a bummer if the first time you and I actually kiss is gonna be on national television. Sure enough, first time we kissed is in that coffee shop, but we just channeled all of our adoration and love for each other into Ross and Rachel.”
Cordon asked if anyone in the cast knew that Aniston and Schwimmer were into each other and both Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry they did. "We knew, we knew," Perry said. "We all knew," Cox said.
Aniston went on to joke that the real-life crush made that first kiss in the coffee feel really real. “Yeah, we were really just not great actors,” Aniston joked.
Schwimmer admitted that even though he and Aniston had a mutual attraction, “it was a situation that we couldn’t — we couldn’t do anything about it.”
So, who were they dating, since they couldn't date each other?
InStyle reports that Aniston was dating Counting Crows front man Adam Duritz around 1995... Friends Season 2 (the season with Ross and Rachel's first kiss) aired in 1994. Glamour reports that Aniston and Duritz started dating in 1994, and broke up in 1995. According to that blurry timeline, perhaps it was Aniston's relationship with Duritz that prevented her from going further with Schwimmer.
As for Schwimmer, he reportedly dated singer Natalie Imbruglia in the late '90s.
If you wanted to blame August and Everything After and/or Torn for even more of your mid-to-late '90s angst, now you can.
Image: NBC