James McAvoy says meeting his celebrity crush Jennifer Aniston ‘wasn’t great’

Forget “never meet your heroes” — James McAvoy has a mortifying tale about why you should never meet your celebrity crush.

On Wednesday’s episode of Watch What Happens Live, the Speak No Evil star admitted to crushing hard on Friends actress Jennifer Aniston as a kid. Unbeknown to him, they would one day cross paths at a Hollywood party… but the interaction would be far from perfect.

“I did meet her and it wasn’t great,” McAvoy told host Andy Cohen, quickly clarifying, “Not because she’s not great.”

He explained: “I was at a party when I was really young, I was like 22 in L.A., and I met Lucy Liu. And Lucy Liu was really, really nice to me and she was like, ‘Come meet my friends.'”

The Charlie’s Angels star then led McAvoy over to a circle of friends that happened to include a certain TV icon.

“I got parked right beside Jennifer Aniston,” McAvoy recalled. “And just as [Liu] was like, ‘Hey, guys, meet my new friend James,’ instead of saying that, she got pulled aside by a guy she went to high school with. She went away and I was just left standing with all these people going, ‘Hey, what’s up, I’m new in town.'”

Unfortunately, McAvoy made things even more awkward by turning to his celeb crush and blurting out, “So you’re Jennifer Aniston and you’re in Friends.”

Needless to say, the observation didn’t go over particularly well. “It was rough,” McAvoy admitted. “But she was lovely.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

McAvoy certainly isn’t the first Hollywood star to fess up to crushing on Aniston. Her onscreen Friends beau David Schwimmer has admitted to having a “major crush on Jen” during the first season of the hit sitcom. During the show’s 2021 reunion special, he said, “At some point we were both crushing hard on each other, but it was like two ships passing because one of us was always in a relationship and we never crossed that boundary. We respected that.”

Another of her former costars, Jake Gyllenhaal, once joked that playing her love interest in 2002’s The Good Girl was a bit of a struggle. 

“I had a crush on her for years. And working with her was not easy,” Gyllenhaal said, adding that his crush wasn’t rooted in her sitcom work. “[It was] not so much Friends, but kind of her personality from afar, and movies she was in.”

Watch the clip above for more from McAvoy.