ByDaniel Bettridge|Jan 24, 2024, 10:53 PM EST
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Friends launched the careers of its six stars—who were each making $1 million an episode by the final seasons—and welcomed a slew of A-list guests. But there were also a bunch of now-familiar faces who appeared in small roles before making it big.
1. Craig Robinson – Clerk in “The One With Princess Consuela” (February 26, 2004)
On Friends: He plays a store clerk in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment from Friends’s final season.
Since Friends: After a string of similarly small parts, Robinson got his big break as warehouse foreman Darryl Philbin on The Office. He’s also been a hit in Hollywood, where he’s starred in a string of comedies including Hot Tub Time Machine and Pineapple Express.
2. Jim Rash – Nervous Airplane passenger in “The Last One” (May 6, 2004)
On Friends: He sat next to Rachel in the very last episode and got increasingly agitated about the left phalange. Who wouldn’t?
Since Friends: A familiar face on the small screen, Rash really came into his own after he landed the role as the fancy-dress obsessed Dean in Community. He also has achieved success behind the camera, taking home the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Descendants.
3. Mae Whitman – Sarah Tuttle in “The One Where Rachel Quits” (December 12, 1996)
On Friends: Whitman plays Brown Bird Sarah Tuttle, who enlists the help of Ross to sell cookies after the hapless paleontologist accidentally breaks her leg.
Since Friends: Whitman has continued to make couch potatoes chortle with her turn as the anodyne Ann Veal on Arrested Development and most recently as Amber Holt on NBC’s Parenthood.
4. Ellen Pompeo – Missy Goldberg in “The One Where The Stripper Cries” (February 5, 2004)
On Friends: She plays Missy Goldberg, the object of Chandler and Ross’s affection in a flashback to their college years.
Since Friends: Friends was one of Pompeo’s earliest roles. These days the actress is a familiar face thanks to her Golden Globe-winning turn on another broadcast behemoth, Grey’s Anatomy.
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5. Scott Adsit – The Director in “The One With Ross and Monica’s Cousin” (April 19, 2001)
On Friends: He plays an up-and-coming director who auditions Joey for his new film. The audition predictably goes awry, however, thanks to some Silly Putty and a scene that calls for full frontal nudity.
Since Friends: He stayed on at NBC where he played executive producer Pete Hornberger on 30 Rock.
6. Anna Faris – Erica in “The One With The Birth Mother” (January 8, 2004)
On Friends: She was the mother who decided to give Monica and Chandler her baby during Friends‘s final season.
Since Friends: Faris was already something of a big deal when she popped up on Friends, having made appearances in Scary Movie and White Chicks. But it was post-Friends that her career really flourished. She’s currently starring in Mom on CBS.
7. Dan Bucatinsky – The Waiter in “The One With Phoebe’s Birthday Dinner” (October 31, 2002)
On Friends: He plays a disgruntled waiter who’s forced to work around Phoebe’s predictably chaotic birthday dinner.
Since Friends: Bucantinsky has gone from strength to strength since his bit part on the smash hit sitcom. He’s perhaps most famous for his Emmy Award-winning performance as James Novak on Scandal. But did you know he’s kept the Friends connection alive by working alongside fellow alumnus Lisa Kudrow as a producer on the improv web series Web Therapy?
8. Dakota Fanning – Mackenzie in “The One With Princess Consuela” (February 26, 2004)
On Friends: She hands out advice to Joey who’s struggling to come to terms with Monica and Chandler moving to the ‘burbs.
Since Friends: Fanning has had quite the film career. She worked with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise on War of the Worlds, Neil Gaiman on Coraline, and even found time to pop up in the Twilight Saga.
9. Mark Consuelos – Policeman in “The One With Chandler’s Dad” (May 10, 2001)
On Friends: He plays the officer who pulls Rachel over after she’s caught speeding in Monica’s Porsche.
Since Friends: Though he was best known for his recurring role on All My Children, Consuelos’s Friends cameo led him to new pastures, including movie roles in films like Cop Out and My Super Ex-Girlfriend.
10. T.J. Thyne – Dr. Oberman in “The One Hundredth” (October 8, 1998)
On Friends: He plays Dr. Oberman, a first-year medical resident with no strong feelings toward Fonzie or any of the Happy Days gang.
Since Friends: He’s appeared on a smorgasbord of small-screen hits from 24 to The O.C., but Thyne is perhaps most recognizable as Bones’s sardonic Dr. Jack Hodgins.
11. Willie Garson – Steve in “The One Where The Girl Hits Joey” (February 18, 1999)
On Friends: He plays the president of the tenants committee who falls out with Ross after he refuses to chip in $100 for the retiring handyman at his new apartment complex.
Since Friends: Garson is best known for playing Carrie’s friend in Sex and the City.
12. Cole Sprouse – Ben Geller in “The One With The Holiday Armadillo” (December 14, 2000)
On Friends: Several actors played Ross’s son, Ben, but Cole Sprouse is perhaps the most memorable—if only for showcasing why Rachel should never be left alone with children.
Since Friends: Cole has a twin named Dylan (who didn’t appear on Friends) and the duo went on to become a big deal in Disney’s smash hit series The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and its subsequent spinoffs.
13. Melora Hardin – Celia in “The One With The Stoned Guy” (February 16, 1995)
On Friends: Hardin played one of Ross’s many exes, a colleague who gets attacked by Marcel but still wants the prudish paleontologist to talk dirty to her.
Since Friends: Recurring roles on Monk and as Jan on The Office have helped make Hardin a familiar face. She’s also a talented musician and sang the national anthem before two NHL games in 2010.
14. Emily Osment – Lelani Mayolanofavich in “The One with the Halloween Party” (November 1, 2001)
On Friends: She plays a trick-or-treater who gets a check from Rachel in lieu of candy.
Since Friends: Osment found fame after appearing in two of the hit Spy Kids sequels before landing a recurring role alongside Miley Cyrus in Disney’s Hannah Montana. She’s currently the star of ABC comedy Young and Hungry.
15. Paget Brewster – Kathy in “The One With Joey’s New Girlfriend” (October 30, 1997)
On Friends: She played Kathy, the woman at the point of a love triangle between Joey and Chandler.
Since Friends: Brewster stayed on the schedules, clocking in her most on-screen hours as Supervisory Special Agent Emily Prentiss on CBS’s Criminal Minds. She’s also continued to make guest appearances on comedies like Modern Family and Community.
16. Christine Taylor – Bonnie in “The One With The Jellyfish” (September 25, 1997)
On Friends: She was Phoebe’s friend who was supposed to be bald and crazy but turned out to be blonde and hot. She dated Ross until Rachel’s meddling led to their split.
Since Friends: She’s starred in hits including Zoolander and Dodgeball. In 2000 she married Ben Stiller.
17. Leah Remini – Lydia in “The One With The Birth” (May 11, 1995)
On Friends: A few years after playing Stacey Carosi on the Malibu Sands episodes of Saved by the Bell, Remini was a sassy mother-to-be who argues about sports with Joey—who steps in as an impromptu birth-coach when she goes into labor.
Since Friends: She starred on The King of Queens and has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, The Talk, and a TLC reality show about her family.
18. Kristin Davis – Erin in “The One With Ross’s Library Book” (November 16, 2000)
On Friends: She breaks Joey’s heart.
Since Friends: By the time this episode aired, she was making a name for herself as Sex and the City’s resident prude, Charlotte.
19. Rebecca Romijn – Cheryl in “The One With The Dirty Girl” (November 6, 1997)
On Friends: She’s the titular “dirty girl” in this episode in which her relationship with Ross is doomed after he objects to the cleanliness of her apartment.
Since Friends: She’s most famous for her role as shape-shifting siren Mystique in the X-Men movies, though you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize her under all of the blue makeup.
20. Steve Zahn – Duncan in “The One With Phoebe’s Husband” (October 12, 1995)
On Friends: He plays Duncan, a gay Canadian ice dancer that Phoebe married in order to get him a green card.
Since Friends: After finding fame on Friends, Zahn went on to star in a string of mid-’90s hits such as That Thing You Do and You’ve Got Mail. Most recently, however, Zahn’s been plying his trade back on the small screen with a character role in Treme and a starring turn alongside Christian Slater in ABC’s Mind Games.
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20 Things Millennials Grew Up With That Are Already Obsolete
Kids growing up in the 2020s might not recognize many of these items.
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Oct 24, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT
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Millennials were born sometime between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s, with 1981 and 1996 often suggested to be the cut-off point. As such, many millennials were kids when the digital age first took hold, teenagers when the internet first became widespread, and are now working adults in the social media, cell phone, and remote working age of the 2020s.
Growing up in such a technologically progressive time ultimately means that despite still being only in their 30s or early 40s, a lot of things that were staples in a millennial’s childhood are now already old-fashioned, if not completely obsolete.
VIDEO RENTAL STORES
There’s been a growing trend among Gen Zers in recent years around re-embracing physical media, but Millennials got there first. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, you could browse hundreds of titles in your local Blockbuster, pick one or two to keep you entertained over the weekend, and then do the whole thing again the following week.
VIDEO CASSETTE RECORDER
Digitization and streaming not only did away with video rental stores, but also the VCR video cassette players on which you watched the films themselves. There was something pleasingly tactile about pushing the cassette tape into the VCR and pressing play that the streaming age just isn’t able to match.
GLASS-FRONTED TELEVISIONS
Not only have VCRs disappeared, but so too have those clunky, solid glass-fronted television sets they were connected with. Yes, they were hazy. Yes, they were all but impossible to move. Yes, they took an age to warm up. And no, you couldn’t hang them on the wall. But there must have been some positives, surely?
‘APPOINTMENT’ TV – MTV
On the subject of television, long before catch-up services and streaming platforms became the standard, catching your favorite television program meant catching it there and then, at the time and date that it was scheduled; otherwise you’d be hard pressed to catch it at all. Digital recording services made us less reliable on so-called “appointment” TV in the early 2000s, but these days you can pretty much watch whatever you want whenever you want it (and catch up with clips and behind-the-scenes footage on YouTube besides).
FLOPPY DISKS
Not only have floppy disks become a thing of the past, but so too have the CD-ROMs that replaced them. Long before USBs, wireless downloads, and Cloud services massively changed the way we use our computers, actual disks—kept in a handy clear-plastic covered storage box—was the only way to access your files and play games on the computers of the past.
WALKMAN
Released by Sony in 1979 before becoming the must-have gadget for music lovers in the 1980s, the Walkman personal cassette player made being out and about, yet still able to listen to your favorite music, a reality for people for the very first time. A decade later, handier (and more easily skippable) portable CD players followed, but both have now been usurped by streaming services and smartphones.
MP3 PLAYERS
The stepping stone between the physical and portable cassette and CD players of the 80s and 90s and the Wi-Fi powered smartphones of today were the MP3 players of the 2000s. Chief among them, arguably, was Apple’s iPod, introduced in 2001, with its sleek design, scrollable screen and ergonomic controls.
PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM
Film cameras are one of a handful of Millennial-friendly gadgets that are making something of a comeback in the 2020s, but their heyday has sadly long gone. Gen Zers and Alphas will never know the feeling of taking a spool of pictures, and then having to wait a few days for them all to be developed in order to see if any of them were any good.
CAMCORDERS
Another once-cutting-edge piece of photographic tech that has long since been downsized and usurped by smartphones was the camcorder. Although the first handheld home video cameras emerged way back in the 60s, it was in the 80s and 90s that they became staples at school plays, graduations, weddings, and other family events—providing comedy clip shows with hours of footage whenever anything went wrong.
ANSWERING MACHINES
Cell phones, smartphones, text messages, and voice notes have all transformed how we keep in touch with one another in the 21st century, with the result being that even telephones calls are said to be all but going extinct. Another bit of telephone tech that we’ve lost along the way, though, was the humble answering machine—along with its mini cassette tape full of people’s messages.
PAGERS
The advent of text messages has also rendered pagers a thing of the past too. At one point in the mid 90s, there were more than 60 million pagers in use around the world; today, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who still uses one outside of a handful of increasingly niche industries.
LANDLINE TELEPHONES (AND DIAL-UP INTERNET)
No texting or Facetime-ing your friends in the 90s. If you wanted to arrange a meeting or check what homework you’d missed, you had to call the family landline—which inevitably meant a brief catch-up chat with one of your friend’s parents too. In the early days of dial-up internet, moreover, having a landline in the house meant no one could reach you while you were online, like some kind of dial-up version of airplane mode.
PAYPHONES
Unless your battery goes or your stuck somewhere in a signal black hole, chances are you’ll never need to use a public telephone booth any time soon too. Back in the day, being out and about and needing to call home or book a taxi inevitably meant finding some loose change and waiting for the coin to drop.
MEMORIZED TELEPHONE NUMBERS
Having a built-in address book in your smartphone has not only made the likes of paper address books and telephone books a thing of the past, but has made it entirely unnecessary to remember all of your friends and family members’ phone numbers, addresses, and zip codes. Doubtless, much to the surprise of anyone Gen Z and beyond, there was a time when your average mom could reel off two dozen of her most-used telephone numbers off the top of her head with no problem at all.
OVERHEAD PROJECTORS
From backpacks to lunch queues, there’s much about the average school day that has barely changed since the 80s and 90s, but some of the surrounding school and classroom technology definitely has. In the days of electronic tablets, laptops, digital projectors, and touchscreen smart boards, there’s sadly no need for the classic overhead projector, along with its handwritten and hand-drawn transparent sheets of classroom notes and homework exercises.
CHALKBOARDS
Whiteboards and smartboards have also done away with the classic chalkboard in many school classrooms—which has the knock-on effect of ridding the school of that musky chalk dust smell that used to fill the halls, and the teacher’s punishment of cleaning the chalkboard erasers after class.
GLOBES AND ATLASES
Once a fixture of geography classrooms as well as school kids’ bedrooms, spinning plastic or wooden globes have likewise become increasingly obsolete in a world now more suited to scrolling Google Earth or Wikipedia to find out more about the world. You’re equally unlikely to find a paper atlas being much used today too—not least while driving, with glovebox road maps long replaced by satnav systems of Google Maps.
DICTIONARIES
We’re all far more likely to scroll a website or ask a search engine for the spelling or meaning of a word these days too, rather than haul a dusty old tome off the shelf and check a definition or a typo by hand. Multi-volume encyclopedias too are becoming ever more old-fashioned in a world where you’re more likely to carry the sum of all human knowledge in an entirely searchable mobile telephone kept in your pocket than on a groaning bookshelf at home.
CARD CATALOGS
Head down to your local library (if that too hasn’t already gone by the wayside), and its catalog of books will likely no longer be kept in banks of card-filled A-to-Z drawers, either. Instead, you’ll likely have to search the catalog database online—saving time, certainly, but doing away with another far more tactile Millennial experience.
MCDONALDS PARTIES
You can still book a party in many McDonalds branches and franchises these days, of course, but back in the 80s and 90s there was something far more special about it—right down to the indoor carousels, effigies of the characters, and (if you were lucky) live-action Ronald McDonald.
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