Actor who starred as Gunther the barista in the sitcom
JAMES MICHAEL TYLER, who has died of prostate cancer aged 59, was an actor known as the “seventh Friend” – Gunther, the barista, in the hit sitcom Friends.
He was originally hired as an extra, beating others to the role because he had experience operating an espresso machine. His character was manager of the Central Perk coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village, a regular meeting point for the sextet of characters who turned Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Leblanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer into worldwide stars.
Tyler joined Friends for its second episode but had no lines – or on-screen credit – until the 33rd programme. He appeared in 150 episodes, encompassing the series’s entire 10-year run (1994-2004), with Gunther continually lurking over the shoulders of the main stars while they sip coffee and chat.
A running joke was his being constantly foiled in his attempts to break into the exclusive group. The heartache was compounded by his crush on Rachel (Jennifer Anniston), originally a waitress at Central Perk.
His feelings surfaced when he showed a dislike for Ross (Schwimmer) after he became Rachel’s boyfriend, Gunther responding to his coffee order: “Oh, like you don’t already have everything.”
In early episodes, it was revealed that he had previously been an actor but was out of work after the daytime soap All My Children killed off his character in an avalanche.
His peroxide blond hair – the result of letting an aspiring hairdresser friend loose shortly before his audition – was another element to Tyler’s screen persona. The producers liked it and as Tyler recalled: “I had to bleach my hair every week for 10 years – that’s a bit much.”
Eventually, in the final episode of Friends, Gunther reveals his love for Rachel, who tells the love-struck barista: “Oh, I love you, too. Probably not in the same way, but I do. And when I’m in a café having coffee, or I see a man with hair brighter than the sun, I’ll think of you.”
When the programme’s six stars were interviewed by James Corden earlier this year in the TV special
Friends: The Reunion, Tyler – just months before his death – appeared on Zoom.
“It was the most memorable 10 years of my life,” he said of his Friends experience.
James Michael Tyler was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, on May 28 1962, the youngest of five children, to Mary (née Pullen) and Dewitt Tyler, a former US Air Force captain.
Eleven years later, after the family moved to nearby Minona, his parents died within months of each other, his mother from breast cancer and his father in a vehicle accident. He then lived with his sister in Anderson, South Carolina.
After graduating in geology from Clemson University, where he acted in student productions, Tyler gained a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, also from Clemson, in 1984.
Moving to Los Angeles four years later, he sold keyboards in a music shop, broke into films as a production assistant and worked as an extra and a barista at the Bourgeois Pig coffee shop in Hollywood.
Friends led Tyler to have guest roles in Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 2001 and
Scrubs in 2005. Seven years later, he was reunited with
Friends star Leblanc (Joey) to play a fictionalised version of himself for a one-off appearance in the TV industry sitcom
Episodes.
When a pop-up replica of Central Perk was set up in Manhattan’s Soho district to mark the 20th anniversary of Friends in 2014, Tyler made regular appearances to meet fans. He was in London the following year to launch Friendsfest, complete with the coffee shop replica.
Tyler’s first marriage, to Barbara Chadsey in 1995, was dissolved, and in 2017 he married Jennifer Carno, who survives him.