Bradley Whitford Couldn’t Deliver Script to Matthew Perry on Friends Set

Bradley Whitford wanted to give a script to Matthew Perry — and it wasn’t easy!

Whitford, 65, took part in Entertainment Weekly‘s Awardist Drama Actors Roundtable and he reminisced about the secrecy that can sometimes take place on the set of TV shows.

“When I worked on West Wing, we shot a couple of times around the White House,” he said. On the NBC series, he played sharp-tongued and earnest deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman. “And if I went to the White House, the secret service guys would go, ‘Oh hey, you can go through.’ ”

But it was a totally different deal when it came to NBC’s biggest comedy, Friends. The two series were filmed on the same Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif. Whitford and Perry were friends, and in seasons 4 and 5 he appeared as Associate White House counsel Joe Quincy, a Republican serving in the fictional Democratic Bartlet administration. Perry received two guest actor Emmy nods for his time on the series.

But if the Friends security guards had their way, maybe Whitford wouldn’t have gotten Perry the script for his episodes. Whitford said during the roundtable that he once tried to run a script over to Perry, but was stopped by security.

“You just couldn’t get in there,” the Emmy winner said of the Friends set. “They wouldn’t take the script. You couldn’t go in.”

“Show business security always cracks me up,” the Handmaid’s Tale star added with a laugh.

Perry, who died in October 2023 at 54, starred on Friends from 1994 to 2004, while Whitford’s stint in the fictional White House went from 1999 to 2006. In fall of that year, the pair reunited in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, led by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. It lasted just one season, in part because NBC was also airing 30 Rock, which had a similar premise of the behind-the-scenes action on a sketch series.

When Perry died, Whitford remembered their time together in an emotional Instagram post. “Matthew Perry made me laugh. Hard,” he began. “You have not lived until you have witnessed one of his in-between-the-takes confidential riffs on the absurdity of show business and the idiocy of male confidence, wrapped up perfectly with the sudden realization that we were both grown men who wear makeup for a living.”

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“Without substances, Matt had a huge, open heart and a pyrotechnical, joyous brain,” Whitford said, referencing the actor’s public struggles with drug abuse. “I think the most beautiful parts of Matt made him the most vulnerable to the monster that he would have to fight for the rest of his life.”