Matthew Perry and John Krasinski are just some of the actors who stopped their fictional characters from being involved in cheating story lines.
Krasinski rose to stardom playing one half of the iconic Jim and Pam couple from The Office alongside Jenna Fischer. The sitcom, which ran from 2005 to 2013, featured employees at a small paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Jim and Pam were the central love story of the show and subsequently got married in the later seasons. After Pam went on maternity leave, however, there was talk of having Jim cheat with her temporary replacement, Cathy (Lindsey Broad).
“That’s the only time I remember putting my foot down,” Krasinski recalled in Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office, which was written by his costar Brian Baumgartner. “I remember saying things that I never thought I’d say before, like, ‘I’m not going to shoot it.’”
Meanwhile, Perry allegedly stepped in when an idea was pitched where his Friends character, Chandler Bing, would cheat on wife Monica Geller (Courteney Cox). Lisa Cash, who was meant to play the hotel worker who hooks up with Chandler, recalled the eliminated story line after Perry’s death in October 2023.
“We had rehearsed it and everything, and then the day before we were shooting in front of a live audience, I was told that [Matthew] went to the writers and said the audience would never forgive him for cheating on Monica,” Cash told TMZ one month later. “He was probably right. That would’ve changed possibly the course of the show and his character.”
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John Krasinski (‘The Office’)
The actor recalled not allowing Jim to be unfaithful, writing in 2021’s The Ultimate Oral History of The Office, “My feeling is there is a threshold with which you can push our audience. They are so dedicated. We have shown such great respect to them. But there’s a moment where if you push them too far, they’ll never come back. And I think that if you show Jim cheating, they’ll never come back.”
Show creator Greg Daniels ultimately agreed to remove the scene but still stands by the idea. “I feel like that kind of worry was good in terms of the fans’ engagement,” he added in the book. “I needed to worry them that maybe I was going to give them a bad ending so they were happy when they got a good ending.”
Fischer, however, later questioned the planned plot, saying on a September 2023 episode of her “Office Ladies” podcast, “Jim was never going to have an affair with, or hook up with, Cathy. However, there were things about the proposed story line that did bump me and John [the wrong way].”
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Matthew Perry (‘Friends’)
According to Cash, Monica and Chandler’s Las Vegas argument was meant to end with infidelity. Perry allegedly shut the idea down before it was filmed because he didn’t believe Chandler would cheat on Monica.
“I think it was a good move,” Cash told TMZ in November 2023. “Because they had that other thing with the Ross and Rachel ‘we were on a break,’ but Chandler and Monica weren’t on a break. This was a decision that he was gonna make to cheat on her.”
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Michelle Rodriguez (‘Fast and Furious’)
Rodriguez, who plays Letty in the ongoing Fast and Furious film franchise, recalled rejecting a story line that involved her character cheating on Dominic (Vin Diesel) with Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker).
“I basically cried and said, ‘I’m going to quit’ and, ‘Don’t sue me, please — I’m sorry, but I can’t do this in front of millions of people,’” she told the Daily Beast in 2017. “My whole point in being an actress is that I thought I got to live a dream. And I don’t dream about being a slut! Do you?!”
Rodriguez added: “Vin was the first one to pull me to the side while I was crying, and he just looked at me and said, ‘I got your back. Chill out and let me handle this, and you’re right — it makes me look bad anyway.’ And there you go. That was the beginning of the Letty fairytale.”
