James Michael Tyler Biography

MARITAL STATUS
Profession Actor
Nationality American
Birth May 28, 1962 (Winona, Mississippi – United States)
Death October 24, 2021

BIOGRAPHY
Before playing the waiter at Central Perk, James Michael Tyler was a bartender in a cafe. More precisely within an establishment called Bourgeois Pig and located in Los Angeles. A position that he will keep in parallel during the first four seasons of Friends .

Indeed, his character was initially only supposed to be a small role. If he was chosen for the role of Gunther, it was because he was the only one of the extras who knew how to operate the Central Perk coffee machine correctly! A quality for which the American will be greatly rewarded: Gunther is, behind the six main heroes, the only character to appear in more than 100 episodes of the series. 150 to be precise, making him the “seventh Friend”.

After Friends will be more complicated for the actor. After an appearance in Scrubs (2005), he filmed a few episodes of the comedy Modern Music in 2013. In the cinema, he can be seen in Jason’s Big Problem (2011), which did not cross the Atlantic.

In 2018, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. If his illness had prevented him from participating on set in the reunion broadcast in 2021, he had insisted on delivering a short video message, wearing a Central Perk cap. He died of illness the same year at the age of 59 in Los Angeles .