What could have been! Working on film and TV sets puts actors in close quarters — which can sometimes lead to unexpected feelings off screen.
For David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston, it was getting into character as Rachel Green and Ross Geller, respectively, that sparked something for the costars.
“The first season, I had a major crush on Jen,” Schwimmer shared during the May 2021 Friends reunion special on HBOMax.
Aniston revealed that the feelings were “reciprocated” while filming the original series, which aired from 1994 to 2004.
Schwimmer explained that even though they both felt strongly for each other, they chose not to pay attention to those feelings.
“I think at some point we were both crushing hard on each other, but it was like two ships passing because one of us was always in a relationship, and we never crossed that boundary,” he said during the special. “We respected that.”
Instead, the cast members became close friends over the years and allowed the romance to stay between their fictional counterparts.
Not all actors developed crushes on their fictional love interests. While Hermione Granger wasn’t romantically interested in Draco Malfoy during the Harry Potter film franchise, Emma Watson was definitely interested in her costar at the time.
“Between the ages of 10 and 12 I had a really terrible crush on Tom Felton, to the extent that I would go into work in the morning and look down the numbers on the call sheet to see if he was going to be in,” Watson told Jonathan Ross in 2009. “We love a bad guy, he was a few years older and he had a skateboard — and that just did it really.”
Watson added that Felton knew about her crush, but he didn’t reciprocate those feelings.
“He totally knew and the thing is that he’d tell everyone, ‘I see her in a younger, sisterly way,’ and it just broke my heart,” she said. “It still does.”
Watson’s costar Evanna Lynch may not have been there at the time, but word spread quickly about the unrequited crush.
“Oh, it was so disappointing for me because I joined on the fifth one,” Lynch exclusively told Us Weekly in June 2021. “I was on Order of the Phoenix and there was this sense that exciting things had happened in the last movie, and I just missed it. [I joined when] everyone had kind of grown out of their crushes and they were moving on to, like, people in the outside world.”
She added: “And I felt that like, damn, I missed all the drama! It was so fun the last film, according to some stories. But no, by the time I got there, they were all mature and those hormones were calming down.”
Scroll down for more actors that spoke about the crushes they developed on set:
