TV

The Gellers Paradox: Friends Fans Found Monica, Jack Were Played by Other People

The Gellers Paradox: Friends Fans Found Monica, Jack Were Played by Other People
Image credit: NBC

Decades after the finale of Friends, fans keep noticing weird details. For one, they realized that in some episodes, Monica and her father were played by other actors!

Summary:

  • Fans recently noticed that in one scene of Friends, Monica Geller is portrayed by a different woman, not Courteney Cox.
  • In 2020, a similar scene with Jack Geller was discovered, where someone but Elliott Gould played him.
  • This happened because of screen aspect ratio changes: on wider screens, we see things we were not meant to, initially.

Friends has undoubtedly proven to be the most iconic and popular sitcom of all time, and millions of fans all over the world still love and rewatch it every so often even two decades after the finale of the show. And the more they rewatch this series, the more bizarre details they uncover — and we’re not talking about Chandler’s jokes!

Have you ever noticed that the Geller family had this weird phenomenon where they looked different from time to time? Monica and Jack Gellers, specifically, suffered from this weird condition of metamorphism.

Who Played Monica Apart from Courteney Cox?

Recently, Tiktoker @fictional.worlds shared a peculiar find on their account. In this scene from Friends, you can notice that when the camera switches to Monica’s side profile, it’s an entirely different actress who has little in common with Courteney Cox apart from black hair and pale skin. We might never learn who she was, but she was there.

@fictional.worlds im so confused #fyp #friends ♬ original sound - Samantha Crouch

Interestingly enough, Monica was not the only member of the Geller family who changed from time to time. Her father, Jack, was also portrayed by someone else.

Who Played Jack Apart from Elliott Gould?

The same situation happened in 2020 when Tiktoker @bronniiieee pointed out that in the following scene, Jack Geller is portrayed by a random person who’s both much shorter than Elliott Gould…and wears glasses! Unlike Gould, who didn’t have glasses in Friends, the unknown actor wore them right there in the scene, and no one cared.

@bronniiieee Who is THAT? #friendstok #tvbloopers #tvblooperfound #whoknew #trending #viral #fyp #foryou #xyzcba ♬ There goes the crackhead - MattActorGordon

Perhaps, fans will keep finding more strangers in well-familiar shots as time goes by since it can’t be that only Monica and Jack Gellers suffered from the curse.

Why Did These Things Even Happen?

The real reason behind these weird replacements is that back when Friends was released, the standard aspect ratio of screens was different, and the show used random actors as placeholders because literally no one would see them. But the modern version of Friends with a wider aspect ratio revealed these inconsistencies.