- - Melora Hardin explains why she was 'totally freaked out' to work with Marcel the monkey on “Friends”

Ryan ColemanDecember 24, 2025 at 5:00 PM

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Melora Hardin and Marcel the monkey on 'Friends'Key Points -

Melora Hardin is reflecting on working with the monkey character Marcel on an infamous 1994 episode of Friends.

"Everybody hated the monkey on Friends," Hardin tells EW. "They all hated working with the monkey."

In season 1's "The One With the Stoned Guy," Hardin's Celia is interrupted from her flirtatious advances toward David Schwimmer's Ross by Marcel, who yanks on her hair: "I was totally freaked out."

Melora Hardin loves working with animals, but knows that sometimes it can be a nightmare.

"I've worked with so many animals in my career," the star of The Office, Monk, The Bold Type, 17 Again, and more tells Entertainment Weekly. "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," she laughs.

Hardin is especially experienced when it comes to working with monkeys and other primates. She recalled acting opposite a "huge chimpanzee [that] fell in love with me" on Cliffwood Avenue Kids, a "Little Rascals-type show" that premiered in 1977; she was bit by a monkey on the set of Equal Justice, a '90s legal procedural starring Sarah Jessica Parker; and then, of course, in her infamous scene with Marcel the monkey on Friends.

"Everybody hated the monkey on Friends," Hardin says. "They all hated working with the monkey."

Melora Hardin and David Schwimmer on 'Friends'

She explains: "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."

Marcel was a white-headed capuchin played doubly by the primate actress Katie and a monkey literally named Monkey that Ross (David Schwimmer) toted around the first season of the beloved sitcom. Despite the cast's aversion to Marcel, Hardin recalls, "I felt safe because I just love animals. The trainers were great, and they were always really nice to me. Looking back on it, I don't know, I suppose something bad could have happened. Totally. But it never did."

Still, Hardin's memorable scene in season 1's "The One With the Stoned Guy," in which Marcel yanks on her hair while her Celia and Ross are attempting a night of intimacy, required the series' most difficult high-wire feats of acting.

"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."

Hardin had to engineer a kind of double performance, in which she reacted with enough panic to appear believable, but not so much that she genuinely spooked the simian star. "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."

How did she actually feel performing the scene as scripted? "I was totally freaked out."

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Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

Melora Hardin on 'The Office'

Hardin's hard work clearly paid off, as "The One With the Stoned Guy" remains one of the most loved episodes of the sitcom's early seasons.

Though she has fond memories of Marcel, she correctly recalls the cast's general feeling about the character. Schwimmer declared in no uncertain terms in a 1995 EW interview, "I hate the monkey... I wish it were dead." Schwimmer went on, "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."

During HBO's 2021 Friends reunion, Schwimmer elaborated, "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."

Later that same year, however, the monkey's trainer, Mike Morris, accused Schwimmer of being "jealous" because Marcel was "getting a lot of laughs." Schwimmer ultimately got his way, as Marcel was written off the series after season 1, though did come up by name in jokes on subsequent episodes.

on Entertainment Weekly

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