Struggling actor found fame as barista smitten by Friends character Rachel

James Michael Tyler had been playing a nameless, wordless barista on Friends for a season when Marta Kauffman, the hit show’s co-creator, inquired about his acting chops. ‘‘I have a master of fine arts in acting, actually,’’ Tyler replied, to Kauffman’s delight. A week later, she informed him: ‘‘Your name is Gunther now.’’ No longer an extra, he spoke his first line that day: ‘‘Yeah.’’ It was a modest start to the defining role of his career, which saw him appear in 150 of the show’s 236 episodes, more than any other actor outside the six titular friends, and earned him the fan moniker of ‘‘seventh friend’’.

His signature deep voice, bright ties and bleached hair made him a distinctive presence on the set of the Central Perk cafe, where much of the show was shot.

Though few storylines involved him directly, he had his own arc as the long-suffering devotee of Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel Green – a love he eventually declared to her in the tenth, and final, series.

Mainly, Tyler – who has died aged 59 – dipped in and out of conversations between the leads, alternating between delivering words of support and reality checks to an endearing, yet self-indulgent, cast.

When Lego released a Friends-inspired set, it featured not only the main characters, Phoebe, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey and Ross, but Tyler’s character, too. ‘‘It would not be Central Perk without Gunther,’’ Lego told him, to his amazement.

James Michael Tyler was born in Winona, a city in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of five children of a retired air force captain and a homemaker. He studied geology and drama at Georgia University, before trying his luck in Los Angeles. ‘‘I was 24 when I went for the Hollywood dream and packed up my old car with everything I owned and headed off,’’ he told The Sun in 1998.

As a jobbing stage actor, he shared an apartment with about a dozen other actors and artists, surviving for seven years on rice, beans and pot noodles. The low point came when he took a job handing out cereal samples in a supermarket.

‘‘It was awful stuff and hardly anyone wanted it,’’ he later recalled. ‘‘The store didn’t want it either, so I ended up with an entire case of it. I took it home and lived off it for two weeks.’’

Still he did not give up on his dreams of acting. ‘‘Hollywood can be brutal,’’ he said. ‘‘The repeated rejection is the worst part but I persevered. I have ancestors from Cardiff, so I put it down to that determined Welsh spirit.’’

Eventually he was hired by The Bourgeois Pig, an independent coffee shop in Hollywood. It was there that he met his first wife, Barbara Chadsey, whom he married in 1995. That barista experience gave Joel Wang, an assistant director on Friends, the idea to put him behind the counter of Central Perk, to make the set seem more ‘‘authentic’’.

The night before the shoot, a stylist friend asked Tyler whether he might practise bleaching on his hair. Tyler agreed and the makers of Friends loved the result. What should have been a one-off became his look for the duration of the show. He had to bleach his hair every week for a decade.

Though his role was small, he composed his own backstory, imagining Gunther as a commuter from New Jersey, which would explain his regular bouts of grumpiness. Acting in love with Rachel, meanwhile, did not require much effort, as he found Aniston ‘‘drop-dead gorgeous’’, he said. His one-sided rivalry with Rachel’s main romantic interest, Ross Geller, provided ample fodder for comedy throughout the show’s life.

Aside from Friends he briefly appeared on several other TV shows, including Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Scrubs and Episodes ,in which he acted once again alongside Matt LeBlanc, who was Joey Tribbiani in Friends, only this time playing themselves.

A keen musician, he owned three keyboards and music computers as well as recording equipment. His favourite bands were Heaven 17, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) – its co-founder Jeff Lynne was his musical hero – and the Human League.

He is survived by his second wife, Jennifer Carno, whom he married in 2017. He had no children.

Although diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2018, he continued to act during his treatment, performing in a short film, The Gesture and the Word.

When Gunther finally declared his love to Rachel, she made it clear that the feeling was not mutual, but let him down kindly, saying: ‘‘When I’m in a cafe, having coffee, or I see a man with hair brighter than the sun, I’ll think of you.’’ It was a touching end to one of the show’s longest-running jokes. –

‘‘Hollywood can be brutal. The repeated rejection is the worst part but I persevered.’’