Chandler had to cheat on Monica in Las Vegas in Friends, Matthew Perry said no!
“In our scenario, Chandler went up to his hotel room, ordered room service…”
We know that the story of Chandler and Monica was not initially supposed to last in Friends. It was the hyper-enthusiastic reaction of the public that motivated the authors to keep the couple. But everything could have ended badly for them, because Chandler had to cheat on Monica at the end of season 5!
When the couple went to Las Vegas to celebrate their first anniversary and visit Joey, Chandler was supposed to have an affair at the hotel. In “The One in Vegas: Part 1”, furious that Monica went to lunch with Richard, he made out with an employee at Caesars Palace.
It is Lisa Cash who was to play this role and who says today in an interview with TMZ: “I arrived in Friends as a guest star and I was super excited”confides the actress, a few days after the death of Matthew Perry. She goes on to explain that initially “In our scenario, Chandler went up to his hotel room, ordered room service. I brought it to her as a hotel employee and we talked. We ended up talking for a long time, laughing, we connected… and Chandler ended up cheating on Monica with my character.”
But this scene never happened. Because Matthew Perry didn’t want such a twist for his character : “We had rehearsed it and everything and then the day before we shot it in front of an audience, I was told that Perry had gone to the writers and told them that the audience would never forgive (Chandler) for cheating on Monica. He was probably right! It might have changed the course of the show and his character.”
Instead, he proposed under a craps table. Lisa Cashshe was entitled to a (much lesser) consolation role playing Ross and Rachel’s flight attendant, at the end of this same episode.
