Matthew Perry knew Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer were sweet on each other during Friends

Jennifer Aniston revealed during the Friends reunion that she had special feelings for David Schwimmer when they were filming Friends.

Now, Matthew Perry has admitted that he knew all along that Jennifer and David were sweet to each other, adding that when he found out, his long-standing crush on Aniston was finally “displaced.”

“But how can you not be in love with Jennifer Aniston, you know?” Matthew, 53, continued heartwarmingly: The Jess Cagle Show.

Jennifer and David starred as Ross and Rachel, the on-again, off-again, off-again couple that kept fans guessing throughout the series if they’d end up together.

During last year’s much-discussed reunion special, both actors admitted that they were in love during the show, but never did anything with them.

Matthew reflected with a pale smile in his new interview that he “knew what was going on” between David and Jennifer at the time.

“But at first it was like she’d walk in and I’d say, ‘Hey, good to see you!’ and I’d go to my dressing room and I’d just say, “Oh, I’ll never be able to be with her,” Perry said.

Eventually, though, he got together and “at one point just went, ‘Okay, that’s enough. That’s enough. It’s enough now.'”

Matthew has made the media rounds for his new memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, in which he revealed that he had asked Jennifer before they were on the show but amicably declined.

After getting over Jennifer, he temporarily developed feelings for Courteney Cox, who played his love interest on Friends, and their other female co-star Lisa Kudrow.

“So I made it a little hard to get to work because I had to pretend I wasn’t in love,” he told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.

After becoming a star, he had high profile romances with celebrities like Julia Roberts.

During his time on the show, Matthew maintained a close relationship with Jennifer, who confronted him when his addictions spiraled out of control.

He was surprised and thought he had effectively hidden his drinking from the rest of the cast, but she told him they could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“But I wasn’t in a position to quit, you know?” Matthew said during his last Good Morning America performance. “And that’s what addiction is. But she was the one who reached out the most, you know. I am very grateful to her for that.’

“In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins cluster around it and support themselves until it gets better,” his book says. “This is what my co-stars on Friends have done for me.”

In 2004, the year Friends ended, Jennifer Diane Sawyer gave an interview in which she burst into tears as she discussed Matthew’s struggles with drugs and alcohol.

“We didn’t know,” she said. “We, you know, we weren’t equipped, we weren’t — to deal with it. You know, nobody had ever dealt with that and, you know, the idea of ​​even losing it or…” she fell off, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

Matthew had his first drink when he was 14 and drank daily when he was 18, before becoming addicted to Vicodin in 1997 while recovering from a jet ski accident.

His memoir has made headlines in recent weeks for its blistering candor about his addictions, including the effect alcohol had on his sex life.

One particularly candid story involved his failed attempts to lose his virginity to his 80s girlfriend Tricia Fisher. “I sat there, soft and sad,” he wrote.