Picture this: You’re a 22-year-old Scotsman, fresh off the boat in Hollywood, ready to make it big. Who do you bump into at a party? None other than the real-life Kung Fu Queen, Lucy Liu. You’re thinking, “This is it, mate. This is your moment!” And then Lucy, in her infinite kindness, says, “Come meet my friends!”
Cue the dramatic entrance of Jennifer Aniston.
Yes, that Jennifer Aniston. The Rachel Green. The ‘How are her hairstyles still relevant?’ Jennifer Aniston.
But hold on, let’s rewind a bit. It’s 2001, James McAvoy is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young actor who’s yet to join the A-list, and he’s just trying to play it cool. Lucy Liu, being the social butterfly she is, starts to introduce him to her clique, which, oh yeah, casually includes Jennifer Aniston. No big deal, right?
Except — WAIT FOR IT — Lucy Liu gets snatched away mid-introduction by some random dude from her high school days, leaving poor baby James stranded in a sea of Hollywood royalty like a penguin in a desert.
Now, here’s the thing about James McAvoy: he’s charming. He’s witty. He’s also… absolutely terrible at handling awkward silences. So, what does he do? He turns to the queen herself, Jennifer Aniston, and in a stroke of conversational genius, blurts out: “So you’re Jennifer Aniston… and you’re in Friends.”
Yes. That’s it. The grand introduction. The line that was supposed to seal his fate as Hollywood’s next big thing. It was like saying to Leonardo da Vinci, “Oh, so you paint, huh?” Or walking up to Einstein and being like, “E=MC squared… nice one, buddy.” A verbal face-plant of epic proportions.
But bless her heart, Jennifer Aniston didn’t run away. She didn’t call security. She just smiled that Aniston smile — the one that says, “I’ve survived 10 seasons of Joey Tribbiani, I can handle this” — and she was, as James put it, “lovely.”
James McAvoy, actor extraordinaire, may have gone on to slay the Hollywood game, but he’ll always have that one fateful night in L.A., where he reduced a conversation with his celebrity crush to the equivalent of an awkward Wikipedia entry.
But hey, at least he didn’t ask her if she really liked coffee.