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Friends’ Ugly Naked Guy Is Finally Revealed as Jon Haugen: I Was Really ‘in Boxer Shorts’

He’s alive! And dressed! The actor who Monica Geller (Courteney Cox) and Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) often peeked at from across the street in Friends has finally been revealed as extra Jon Haugen.

Haugen appeared in a few episodes of the NBC smash but never revealed his face. His character was notably featured in the season 3 (1996) episode “The One With The Giant Poking Device” and the season 5 (1998) episode “The One Where Everybody Finds Out.”

The Huffington Post‘s Todd Van Luling spent more than a year trying to track down Haugen, who was never credited for his shirtless scenes. Van Luling contacted several members of the production team via IMDB, and finally found Haugen thanks to Central Casting employee Jennifer Bender. Haugen agreed to an interview and had only good things to say about his stint on the beloved comedy.

Ugly Naked Guy
Ugly Naked Guy and David Schwimmer as Ross Gellar on ‘Friends.’

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“You want to let the world know who the real Ugly Naked Guy is, huh? There’s only one Ugly Naked Guy, man, and that was me. The reason I never came forward was because I was just keeping it mellow because Warner Brothers was keeping it mellow. They wanted everybody to have a guess who I was,” Haugen told Van Luling.

“I wasn’t really expecting them to call me back for me to do it again,” he continued. “It was the best time in my life. I was the man.”

Haugen shared the small screen with the entire cast — Aniston, Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc. In one memorable scene, the Central Perk gang prodded Ugly Naked Guy with a stick to see if he was still alive.

Friends
Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey and Monica look out the window at Ugly Naked Guy on an episode of ‘Friends.’

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“It wasn’t painful. The hard part was holding my breath,” Haugen explained. “It was, like, almost two o’clock in the morning when we were filming that part and I was real tired because we had rehearsed all day. It was the last scene and I had to make sure I was perfect to get everybody out of there to go home.”

Haugen wouldn’t return to Friends until years later. In season 5, Ross Geller (Schwimmer) persuaded Ugly Naked Guy to sell his apartment to him. (Bring on the muffin baskets!)

“He made me feel like I was his brother,” Haugen said of the People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story star. “I’ve been on a lot of TV sitcoms and Friends was my favorite. Everybody was fantastic. They treated me like I was family.”

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The camaraderie on set may not surprise fans, but this Ugly Naked Guy fact might. Haugen was never, well, actually naked when cameras rolled.

“I was in boxer shorts,” he revealed. “At first I was feeling a little shy because I had about 500 people watching me in the audience besides the crew and everything. But after about two minutes went by, I was real comfortable and David Schwimmer was real comfortable. We were just in boxer shorts and they made it look like we were naked.”

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