“Everybody hated”: Friends guest star Melora Hardin revealed why it was difficult to work with a monkey in the popular sitcom

NBC's iconic hit Friends is known for its long list of guest stars, like Bruce Willis, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Coolidge, Julia Roberts, Danny DeVito, and many more. But one of the memorable characters, even 31 years after its premiere, is Marcel, Ross's pet monkey. Fans met him for the first time in the tenth episode of season 1, "The One with the Monkey".

But not every actor hated working with the monkey, and one of these was Melora Hardin, who also played Jan Levinson in The Office. In Friends, Hardin had a guest role in the fifteenth episode of season 1 as one of Ross's dates. During their date at Ross's apartment, Marcel yanks on her hair. Melora Hardin addressed the scene in an Entertainment Weekly interview published on December 24, 2025:

"I've worked with so many animals in my career. It's crazy. I mean, when I was younger, the whole animal thing was not like it is now. Really. I was probably eight feet from a mountain lion, a bear, a tiger. No, not a tiger."

But she did reveal that several actors of the thirty-year-old iconic show hated working with the monkey:

"Everybody hated the monkey on Friends. They all hated working with the monkey. Again, I'm very comfortable with animals, so I was like, 'Okay, from the trainer, you could tell it was a very high-strung monkey... It was the same kind of monkey [as on Equal Justice]. Those monkeys are just so high strung. They're really hyper kind of animals. They're really highly anxious."

Melora Hardin also talks about how she rehearsed this Friends scene:

As mentioned earlier, Hardin appeared only once in the first season as one of Ross's museum colleagues, Celia. They are on a date in his apartment, and are about to get intimate, when Marcel suddenly yanks on her hair. Hardin to the EW interviewer that she realized that she had to sell Celia's panic only through her expressions to not startle her simian scene partner:

"When I came on to Friends and was dealing with the monkey, and he had to be hanging off my hair, I was just kind of like, 'Tell me what to do.' I could see the monkey was in the trainer's sight line. When we rehearsed it, I understood you can't get big, because the monkey will respond to it. It is an interesting challenge as an actor, because in that particular scene, I had to make sure I was doing it in a way that the monkey didn't think I was really doing that, I wasn't really freaking out. But the audience had to feel I was freaking out. So I had to pick movements that were not going to freak the monkey out, but would look real to the audience."

Why did the cast hate working with the monkey/s?

However, not everyone in the cast shared Hardin's fondness for the monkey. David Schwimmer has been open about not being a fan of working with the monkey because it interrupted the flow. He openly expressed his disdain for working with the animal co-star all the way back in January 1995 in an Entertainment Weekly interview:

"The trainers won't let me bond with it. They're really, really possessive. It's like, 'Land on your marks, do your job, don't touch or bond with the monkey.' It's a bummer."

Schwimmer again expressed a similar sentiment in the 2021 HBOMax Friends reunion:

"Here is my problem: The monkey, obviously, was trained. It had to hit its mark and do its thing right at the perfect time. What inevitably began to happen was we would all have choreographed bits kind of timed out, and it would get messed up because the monkey didn't do its job right. So we would have to reset, we'd have to go again, because the monkey didn't get it right."

But this time, the animal trainer Mike Morris, who handled both Katie and Monkey for the sitcom, responded to Schwimmer's hate in an interview with The Sun:

"This is just my opinion... [but] the first couple episodes [Schwimmer] was pretty friendly with the monkey, and after that, the monkey was getting a lot of laughs, and either it was throwing him off or [he was] getting a little jealous. I don't know. One of those two things."

Morris also addressed the issue of not allowing Schwimmer to bond with the animals on the set of the NBC sitcom:

"It is true that we prefer that actors don't become too friendly with the monkey. An actor is a prop to the monkey and has to work with that prop. We don't want them to become friends because then [monkeys] think, 'Oh, it's my friend, I don't have to work… They just want to go hang out with their friend instead of doing what they're supposed to do. It's not out of spite or malice."

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All ten seasons of Friends and the 2021 reunion are streaming on HBO Max.

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