Throughout Friends‘ 10 season run a number of characters made their way through the Central Perk, especially as romantic interests for the show’s main characters. Not all of them left a great impression though, and actor Fisher Stevens definitely feels as if he’s in that category. Stevens played the role of Roger, the psychiatrist boyfriend of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe in season 1, and throughout the episode he acts like a jerk to the other characters, breaking them all down with his snarky analysis. In a new interview with EW, Stevens admits that he was also a jerk behind the scenes, and wanted to apologize to the cast.
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“At that moment in my career, I had never done a sitcom before,” Stevens said. “I had never heard of Friends because it was just the beginning of the show and I didn’t watch TV at the time much.”
He also wasn’t familiar with the process of scripts on a sitcom, which can (and often are) rewritten several times and sometimes right before filming. That revelation immediately created issues once he got on the set.
“And then what I didn’t know…so they sent me the script. I was like ‘oh this is fun I’ll do it’, so I learn my lines, I show up, I lived in New York and I flew to LA. I learn my lines and get to the set, and they’re like ‘oh no no no, we’ve rewritten the whole thing because that’s what sitcoms did,” Stevens said. “And I didn’t know that, right? I was kind of an a–hole, I have to admit. ‘What do you mean? So I have to relearn lines that you’ve written that are worse than what you’d originally written?’ Yeah, I was a d—.”
“I’ve rarely seen any of those people on Friends again, but I’m sure if you asked them about me, they would go, ‘What a New York snob’”, Stevens said.
When asked if he wanted to apologize to the cast, Stevens said “Yeah, I’m sorry guys. I’m sorry I was a d— to you all,” he says. “I apologize. I was bad, I was wrong.”
Hopefully they will accept his apology, and Stevens is hopeful too. “Maybe they will too. Hey, there’s a reunion coming up, maybe they will have me back.”
