Paget Brewster’s exploded onto the acting scene following her appearance in the hit television series Friends in the late 90s. However, for a moment, Brewster was unsure if she’d get the chance to appear in the series at all following a hairdressing malfunction.
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Speaking to ComingSoon on her appearance in the 2022 film Hypochondriac, Brewster recounted a story about a time she believed she would be fired from the series before she ever even got to be on camera.
“I thought I was going to get fired though, at one point, because we had been rehearsing and then I went in to have my hair done and the hairdresser…I had a black bob, like, you know, bangs,” said Brewster. “I had black hair, short bob with black bang and the hairdresser cut my hair shorter and stripped it for about six hours and then dyed it red. And when the producers came down to the stage to watch one of our later rehearsals, the producer, Kevin Bright, said ‘Stop, what did you do? Who did that to your hair?’ And I was like, you know, ‘The…your hairdresser did it.’ And he started yelling and he said, ‘I hired her because of her black hair!’ And so I just walked upstairs and went into my little tiny dressing room and put my magazines in my bag and waited, because I thought, ‘Oh, I’m fired because the guy dyed my hair red.’”
Thankfully for Brewster, producer Kevin Bright was just kidding, and quickly came up to Brewster’s dressing room to tell her that he simply was trying to send a message out to the crew members on Friends.
“And then I hear these footsteps like bam, bam, bam, bam, coming up towards the door, and Kevin Bright jumped in the door and he was like, ‘I didn’t hire you because of your black hair,’” Brewster said. “‘I just can’t have people making unilateral decisions without my input.’ And I think you look great and I hope you’re okay with it being red.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, am I fired?’ And he was like, ‘No, no, no, you’re great. I think you’re funny. Come on, let’s go back down and rehearse. I just needed that guy to know he just can’t make decisions without talking to me.’”
Despite everything working out, Brewster did have a theory that her hair was changed to differentiate herself from Courtney Cox’s Monica, who was set to have a romantic relationship with Matthew Perry’s Chandler.
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“But it turns out the next person that Chandler fell for was Monica,” said Brewster. “So there was a little bit of…and the hairdresser had changed my hair because he…my hairstyle was the same as Monica. So he thought he was doing the right thing. But I think there was a little bit of Kevin Bright and [Marta Kauffman] and [David Crane] thinking, “Oh, we know Chandler’s going towards Monica and this girl has short dark hair too.” I don’t know. You know, I don’t know what they were thinking, but that was a bad few minutes when I thought I was going to get fired from Friends.”
Thankfully for Brewster, things ended up well for her, and she continued on to have a great run on the hit series, and an incredibly long career in Hollywood.