How James Michael Tyler’s Gunther – the ‘seventh Friend’ – gave the sitcom its heart
When the much-anticipated Friends reunion finally took place in May, fans of the show couldn’t help but notice a major absence. All six of the principal cast were there. But where was the unofficial “seventh” Friend, James Michael Tyler, aka the supremely cynical Central Perk manager Gunther? Friends without Gunther was like Friends without the opening theme-tune or the quick cut to Jennifer Aniston splashing in a fountain.
Tyler did, finally, appear, but he appeared via Zoom from home and came across as surprisingly downbeat. “It was the most memorable 10 years of my life, honestly,” he said of his decade on the show. “I could not have imagined just a better experience. All these guys were fantastic and just a joy to work with.”
It sounded as though he was saying goodbye, to both the Friends cast and to fans of the 1990s institution. Tragically, it would later transpire that he was. Tyler, who has died aged 59, had kept a lid on his stage-four prostate cancer diagnosis, feeling that such a bombshell would overshadow the joy of the reunion special. “I didn’t want it to be like ‘Oh, and by the way, Gunther has cancer’,” he said in June when he announced his condition in public.
Tyler never received great quantities of screen-time: Gunther didn’t even speak until his 34th appearance on the series. Yet he was crucial to the magic of Friends. The character, who had a long term crush on Aniston’s Rachel, brought an essential tartness to proceedings. If Friends was a swirly froth of 20-something yearning and Gen-X whinging, then Gunther was the bittersweet counterpoint – the spike of caffeine in the comical frappuccino. He rarely laughed, and never seemed impressed by the six leads (bar Rachel, of course).
That’s exactly why he was so funny: Gunther served as an audience surrogate, there to roll his eyes at the absurdly good-looking crew and their first-world problems – and their turbocharged inanity. When, for instance, Matt LeBlanc’s Joey jangled a set of found Porsche keys at Gunther and asked whether they belonged to him, the barista’s sarcasm circuits went into overload. “Yes, that’s what I drive. I make four bucks an hour. I saved up for 350 years.”
Then there were Gunther’s internal monologues, wherein he expressed his true emotions. “I love Rachel. I wish she was my wife,” he said when she started dating Ross (David Schwimmer). It was hilarious because it was so starkly tragic: it was as if someone had smuggled a Smiths song onto the set of a glamorous Hollywood sitcom.
One reason Tyler’s performance convinced was because we saw so little of him outside Friends. He’d been working as a barista – at the Bourgeois Pig in the Hollywood Hills – when he was cast in the show. One day he was serving cappuccinos to struggling actors and “soccer moms”, the next he was dispensing drinks to Jennifer Aniston.
Tyler had grown up in Winona, Mississippi, where he was orphaned at the age of 11 (his mother and father died within year of one another). After gaining a degree in geology, he moved to Los Angeles hoping to become an actor. His early screen career was behind the camera. He worked as a production assistant on the Paul Newman war movie Fat Man and Little Boy. And then along came Friends, where he appeared in 150 out of 236 episodes (or 185 if you count those in which he’s purely in the background).
Post-Friends, however, Tyler found it difficult to move past Gunther. He played himself opposite Matt LeBlanc in the satirical series Episodes, and he had a small part in Scrubs. He had recently had leading roles in two independent films, Processing (2020) and The Gesture and the Word (also 2020, for which he was nominated for a leading award at the London International Film Festival).
It will be Friends, however, for which Tyler will be forever known. Gunther’s love for Rachel was destined to be unrequited. But when he finally confessed his true feelings to her in the final episode of Friends, her response was wonderfully heartfelt. And, revisited today, it reads like a perfect epitaph for both Tyler and the character he inhabited so winningly.
“I love you too,” she said. “Probably not in the same way. But when I’m in a café having coffee, and I see a man with hair brighter than the sun, I’ll think of you.”