He's tossing around a rubber doll used as Ross' baby during rehersals (at actual tapings, triplets talk turns playing the baby, named Ben), whacking it against the wall as the other Friends look on gleefully. Catching sight of a reporter, he sheepishly apologizes--then goes right on using it to play catch with the cast and crew.
The six actors are in the first heady months of real stardom, and it shows: They're alternately giddy and guarded, exhilerated and exhuasted. They spout well-scripted lines about how nicely they get along ("It's really fun; the days fly by," says Matt LeBlanc) but are refreshingly open about their families and new fame. They envision long careers (each is committed to Friends for the next four seasons) but worry about the hassle of celebrity.
"You walk by and people are singing the theme song, and you don't know if they're being sarcastic or they're fans," says Jennifer Aniston.
Cox says tabloid reports--including false ones that she and her boyfriend had married, then split up--rarely faze her. But a tabloid story saying she was bulimic and someone had heard her vomit behind the set alarmed her mother. "I'm so far from bulimic. I'd do anything not to throw up. It hurts when my mom has to explain to her friends that her daughter's OK."
For all but Kudrow--who married this summer--family still means the folks back home. "My grandfather gets a tremendous thrill out of going, 'This is my grandson'," says Perry, who was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Canada. "He's 88 years old. He loves the show, and he'll just grab me: 'Come meet this girl, come meet this woman,' and I'm meeting all these 70-year-old women. The big difference now? It's not 'Oh my God, you're on TV!'--they've been seeing a lot of that--but 'Oh my God, you're on TV on something I'm actually enjoying watching!'"
In Cox's case, there's a twist: Her boyfriend is actor Michael Keaton (Batman 1 and 2). "When I'm not with him, I get noticed. When I'm with him, it still seems that he gets the [attention]. I used to say I could have a unicorn on my head and be naked and walk next to him and a guy would come up and literally go right past me and say, 'Hey, Michael Keaton!'"
Not all attention is welcome. The night after the season's first taping, Aniston felt ambushed when she was followed out of her house by a tabloid TV show's cameras. "You forget. You just can't go to the mall."
"Suddenly your awareness of your place in the world is shifted," Schwimmer says, "and you have to be careful what you do, what you say, and who you're with. And it's too bad."
It's a better class of problem than any of the six are used to. Only Cox had previous brushes with success: She was the girl plucked from the audience in Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark video, then was Michael J. Fox's girlfriend on Family Ties; last year she was Jim Carrey's co-star in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Altogether, the cast members have been in more than a dozen failed sitcoms.
"That's when the rationalizations occur, and I've made them a lot," says Perry, formerly in Sydney (CBS, '90) and Second Chance (Fox, '87). "'OK, the show's not that great, but I'm going to be good in it.' Then you go, 'OK, I'm not going to be that good in it, because it's not going to be that great a show, but it's going to be on TV.' All those ridiculous things."
Now the question is how to parlay this success into something lasting. Schwimmer, scheduled to host Saturday Night Live's September 30 season premiere, made a movie this summer, The Pallbearer, due next spring. The others are weighing their next moves warily.
"Movies are like restaurants," Kudrow says. "The food could be great, the location's fine, it looks really good--and no one shows up." Then she shows she's learning fast: "You get one or two tries, and if it doesn't work, they can't risk that much money on you."