Matthew Perry was immediately ‘attracted’ to Jennifer Aniston — how he reacted to her rejection

nypost.com:

Chandler Bing and Rachel Green on “Friends.”The pair met through mutual acquaintances about three years before the NBC comedy — and Perry was upfront about his feelings early on.“I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her,” Perry shared in his 2022 memoir. “And I got the sense she was intrigued too—maybe it was going to be something.”However, the actress gently turned him down after he was a bit overzealous calling her after he booked two gigs in one day.“‘You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to!'” he recalled telling her.“Bad idea—I could feel ice forming through the phone,” Perry continued. “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.

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!'”Perry’s crush would continue when they kicked off filming “Friends” in 1994.“Fairly early in the making of ‘Friends’ I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston,” he wrote. “Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward.

And then I’d ask myself, ‘How long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?'” “At first it was like, she would walk in, I’d be like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And then I’d go to my dressing room and just go, ‘Oh, I’ll never be able to be with her,'” he remembered.