Weight discrimination | Friends star told to lose weight before securing sitcom job

Few shows have managed to maintain such a powerful presence in popular culture more than Friends.

The long-running sitcom about a group of twenty-somethings bumbling through their careers and relationships captured the feeling of the 90s, and audiences grew to invest heavily in the will-they-won’t-they romance between Ross Geller and Rachel Green.

The show launched the career of a young Jennifer Aniston and secured her place as one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies, however, according to a new book set to analyse the ‘secrets’ of the show on its 25th anniversary, Aniston was ordered to lose over two stone after her agent considered her to be ‘too heavy’ to make it in Hollywood — Metro reported.

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“She had to lose thirty pounds if she wanted to stay in Hollywood,” Saul Austerlitz stated in his book, Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era. “Los Angeles was a tough place to be an actress — it was a tough place to be a woman — and Jennifer Aniston’s agent was reluctantly levelling with her.