Prince Harry admitted that he saw himself in Matthew Perry’s character Chandler in the hit US sitcom Friends.
The royal went into detail about his love obsession with the sitcom in his memoir Spare, and said he binge-watched the show in the summer of 2013 as a means of coping with debilitating panic attacks.
Harry said “it’s possible he watched every episode” of the 10-season, 236-episode series that summer and said he identified with one of the main characters.
Referring to his cheekier and funnier side of his personality, the Duke of Sussex said that he “was a Chandler” – and also admitted to have a crush on Monika, played by actress Courtney Cox.
In Spare, Harry discussed a night in 2016 when he ended up crashing at Courtney’s house. He said: “I found the idea of crashing at Monica’s highly appealing And amusing.”
Referring to himself as a “Friends fanatic”, Harry went on to admit that he had a crush on the actress.
He wrote: “I was still confused because… she was Monica. And I was a Chandler.”
The royal added: “I wondered if I’d ever work up the courage to tell her. Was there enough tequila in California to get me that brave?”
Chandler was played by actor Matthew Perry, who died aged 54 on Saturday night, and during the series his character is known as the “comedian” of the fictional friendship group – having developed his larger-than-life sense of humour when he was younger as a means of coping with his parents’ divorce.
Harry had to go through his own parents’ divorce when he was just eight years old, with a then Prince Charles and Princess Diana divorcing in August 1996.
In a 2017 documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Harry revealed that he found it hard being shuffled between his parents.
He said: “There was the point where our parents split and the two of us [himself and William] were bouncing between the two of them and we never saw our mother enough or we never saw our father enough.
“There was a lot of travelling and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother, which I would win.
“There was all that to contend with. I don’t pretend we’re the only people to have to deal with that, but it was an interesting way of growing up.”
