James Michael Tyler, Who Played Gunther on ‘Friends,’ Dies at 59.

James Michael Tyler, Who Played Gunther on ‘Friends,’ Dies at 59.
Mr.
Tyler’s path to the show was fortuitous.
While working as an actual barista at a real-life coffee shop, he was asked if he would be interested in being an extra on “Friends.” For the first season, his character was known as “Coffee Guy.”

“At the time I was also working as a barista for a place called the Bourgeois Pig, one of the last independent coffee houses in Los Angeles,” Mr.
Tyler told The New York Times in 2012.
In his second season, he got a line of dialogue: “Yeah,” he said, when Mr.
Schwimmer’s character, Ross, asked him if his apartment had stairs.
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Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the show’s co-creators, recalled the beginnings of Mr.
Tyler’s run on the series.
“When he started as an extra on Friends, his unique spirit caught our eye and we knew we had to make him a character,” they said in a statement Sunday night.