Paget Brewster can thank the spunky character of Kathy in Friends for her fame, but she wasn’t exactly sure she’d even nail the part.
Brewster recalled when she was auditioning for the role, she was up against “four very beautiful and very famous actresses. And I thought I’m not gonna get this, so I wasn’t nervous,” she shared on The Talk.
“So the door opened, I went in the room and said ‘Clearly I’m your runty alternate so let’s just get this show on the road.”
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Matthew Perry, who plays Chandler, and Friends producer Kevin Bright were both sitting in on the audition, and later told her, “the moment you called yourself a runt you have the part.”
Kathy was only meant to appear for one episode, but it later extended to two, then four, and finally six before the writers decided to cut her out of the show with a cheating plotline.
Brewster didn’t seem to be the only one who was disappointed, as she would discover after performing a very dangerous stunt.
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These celebrities almost played your favourite Friends
Speaking to uInterview about moments on the set of Friends, Brewster recalled regularly sneaking onto the top of the lighting equipment that was positioned on top of the audience to watch scenes being shot, as she did with the final scene that would decide whether her character stayed in the show.
“It’s very illegal but the Warner Bros. police haven’t arrested me yet,” she quipped.
“I climbed up a ladder on the side [which was] very dumb and I could have hurt myself and a lot of people. I shimmied out onto the rafters to watch the scene where Chandler decides it’s over, and I’m a jerk.”
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But she was surprised when the audience were “all bummed out that Kathy was gonna be gone”.
“I was up in the rafters and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe they won’t write me out’,” she demonstrated excitedly.
But when the writers huddled together with the cast and rewrote it, they came up with the cheating plotline that would end her run on the hit show.
It wasn’t all bad, though, considering it launched her career and allowed her to take on more regular roles, such as the one she has been inhabiting for 19 years now, that of Emily Prentiss in Criminal Minds.
Brewster began on the show as an eager new recruit to the FBI, working her way up to becoming unit chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in the reboot, Criminal Minds: Evolution.
Though she left the show in season 7, along with her co-star AJ Cook, due to an order from the bosses up above wanting new women to front the show, she returned due to fan demand in season 12.
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Throughout her two monumental roles, she also appeared in Andy Richter Controls the Universe (2002), American Dad (2005-2020), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (2012), Community (2015), How I Met Your Father (2022), as well as a countless number of guest appearances.
She has since returned in her role as Emily Prentiss in Criminal Minds: Evolution, which she will continue in it’s upcoming third season.
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