How the Cast of Friends Aged from the First to Last Season
We watched the cast of Friends cry, laugh, drink a ton of coffee, and go through a lot (both on and off screen) over their 10 seasons on air. The show started in 1994 and spanned the rest of the decade all the way into the early 2000s. Just as fashion and culture and society as a whole changed over the course of that time, so did the cast of Friends.
Do you remember what they all looked like during season one? From terrible hair (sorry Joey) to awesome hair (Rachel, every single season), and sort of nerdy (Ross) to slightly less nerdy (Ross, again), we watched the characters on Friends grow from young to old to, well, "older."
In real life, the cast members grew and changed too. Some got married and Botox'd (Courteney Cox), took up yoga (Jennifer Aniston), had babies (Lisa Kudrow), and worked through addiction issues (Matthew Perry). Since so many of us grew up with Friends and progressed in our own lives as the series was on air, we thought it'd be fun to look at how the Friends actors aged from the first to the last season. Check out this list and tell us who you think changed the most.
- 52,013 VOTES
Lisa Kudrow, who was 31 (and the oldest member of the core cast) when the show first aired, might have gone through the most noticeable of changes - mostly because she was pregnant during the taping of the show in 1997. The writers wrote in her pregnancy via the surrogacy storyline.
Aside from her pregnancy, Kudrow's looks didn't change dramatically throughout the series. Her hair remained long and straight throughout the seasons, and her fashion remained as quirky as her character was.
- Age: 59
- Birthplace: Encino, California, United States of America
- 61,904 VOTES
David Schwimmer's (who was 27 years old when the show first aired) character Ross Geller definitely got cooler during Friends' 10 seasons. He went from a nerdy haircut to kind of a spiked Robert Pattinson-esque 'do.
Similarly, his clothing style evolved from dorky sweaters to leather jackets.
- Age: 56
- Birthplace: Astoria, New York, USA
- 71,697 VOTES
James Michael Tyler, the actor who played Central Perks' manager Gunther, only had bleached blond hair on the show due to a random accident. “I had a friend who wanted to be a hairdresser and wanted to practice bleaching someone’s hair, so I offered what hair I had left at the time," he explained. "It came out white and that was the night before I was called in for the first day of shooting the first season.”
Tyler, who was 32 when the show first aired, had to regularly bleach his hair for his 10 year tenure on the show. His character kept the same look throughout the series, and Tyler aged normally, with his hairline receding slightly over the years.- Age: 60
- Birthplace: Winona, Mississippi, United States of America
