 Each main cast member auditioned for Friends having had some degree of prior sitcom experience. Before finally being cast in Friends, Cox's burgeoning success as an actress had heavily relied on her physical appearance. Unlike her previous roles in projects such as Family Ties and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the Los Angeles Times Steve Weinstein believes that Monica was the first major role in which Cox was cast based on her abilities as a comedic actress as opposed to her beauty. Cox believes that she owes winning the role to her brief stint as Gabriella Easden on the short-lived sitcom The Trouble With Larry, which she considers to be the first time she played a character who "was the funny one", which in turn earned the actress a recommendation for Friends following its cancellation. When Friends premiered, Cox was the show's most famous main cast member among a cast of young, relatively unknown actors, and was thus initially perceived by critics and audiences as the show's star, despite Crane and Kauffman's efforts to promote Friends as an ensemble comedy. According to actress Lisa Kudrow, who portrays Phoebe, Cox is responsible for suggesting that the entire cast work together as a team. As the most experienced cast member at the time, Cox advised her co-stars to remain open to each other's ideas, notes and suggestions, while giving them permission to tell her "If I could do anything funnier". Preferring to be treated as equals, the entire cast negotiated for universal salaries, demanding that Warner Bros. accommodate their request of $ 100,000 per episode in season three, increased from their original inaugural season salary of $ 22,000 per episode. At one point, the actors went as far as threatening to boycott their own show should their demands be denied, temporarily refusing to renew their expired contracts. The studio eventually complied, and by season 10 each actor was being paid $ 1 million per episode, making Cox and her female co-stars the highest-paid television actresses of all time.
