Bradley Whitford was denied access to ‘Friends’ set

When it comes to security, the White House is nothing compared to the set of Friends.

After navigating both spaces back in the early 2000s, Bradley Whitford can report that one of them was much more difficult to breach than the other — and it’s not the one that involves secret service. While participating in Entertainment Weekly‘s Awardist Drama Actors Roundtable, the Handmaid’s Tale actor recalled having surprisingly easy access to the home of the American president.

“When I worked on West Wing, we shot a couple of times around the White House,” he tells EW. “And if I went to the White House, the secret service guys would go, ‘Oh hey, you can go through.’”

But security was nowhere near as lax when it came to maintaining the secrets of Central Perk.

Both Friends and The West Wing were shot on the same Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, which should have made it easy for Whitford to bring pal Matthew Perry his scripts when the actor joined the political drama for a three-episode arc. But as Whitford recalls, security didn’t care that he worked on the lot or that he was friends with Perry — they denied him access and refused to pass along the script.

“You just couldn’t get in there,” Whitford says of the Friends stage. “They wouldn’t take the script. You couldn’t go in.”

He adds, “Show business security always cracks me up.”

Eventually, Whitford found a way to get Perry his script and the pair reunited for a few episodes of The West Wing. They previously starred together in the short-lived Aaron Sorkin-created series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

After Perry’s sudden death on Oct. 28, 2023, Whitford penned a heartfelt tribute to his longtime friend. 

“Matt was full of contradictions. He was hilariously self deprecating and insecure and wildly self confident. He was a fountain of light with a huge capacity for darkness. He was profoundly blessed and terribly cursed,” Whitford wrote in 2023. “I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to work with Matt, to spend some precious time with him, and most of all, to be his friend.”

The Awardist roundtable saw Whitford joined by fellow Emmy contenders Aimee Lou Wood (The White Lotus), Tramell Tillman (Severance), Marisa Abela (Industry), Antony Starr (The Boys), and Sharon Horgan (Bad Sisters) — many of whom can commiserate when it comes to the struggle of Hollywood’s commitment to secrecy.

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“We had a fake ending on the call sheet,” Wood tells the group of The White Lotus season 3. “If we left our call sheet somewhere and someone then leaked the ending, so we didn’t have the real ending. There was a different person’s death.”

That said, Wood was surprised by how lax things were when it came to the real scripts.

“I didn’t think we would get all the scripts. I thought there was gonna be this real, top secret kind of giving us a bit at a time,” she says. “But all of a sudden there was eight episodes in my gmail.”

For more with Whitford, Wood and EW’s Awardist Drama Actors Roundtable, watch the full video above.