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Everyone loves the story of co-stars-turned-famous-flames, and as undeniably swoon-worthy as that is, there’s something arguably more magical about co-stars becoming best friends off the silver screen.
Hollywood is known for its competitive, cutthroat nature, and taking that into consideration, the friendships that transcend the rather unfriendly disposition of the business are something really special. Seeing co-stars’ onscreen bonds carry over into real life adds another layer to the fandom and fantasy that film and TV create — there’s just something about your favorite actors being besties for real that feels warm and fuzzy and right, like their time onscreen together had true, undeniable meaning beyond the act for the show.
Whether they met on set or shared the big screen after meeting, these famous friendships are each adorable in their own right. From Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams’ Stark sisterhood come true to Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s wholesome bromance and “friendship tours,” these celebrity comraderies are giving ultimate friendship goals, and we simply can’t get enough. You may even be surprised by a few of these famous friends — who would have guessed Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley would be pals IRL after their portrayal of the Salvatore brothers’ tumultuous relationship in The Vampire Diaries? Certainly not us, but that makes their friendship even more interesting.
If you’re in need of precious besties content and general positivity between people, these celebrity friendships will fill your cup.
Michelle Williams & Busy Phillips
Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips are one of Hollywood’s most beloved BFFs. The pair, who co-starred together in Dawson’s Creek right at the beginning of their careers, have stood by each other ever since, including being each other plus ones to major award shows.
“I’m eternally grateful that we met all those years ago because there’s no one I’d rather weather all the storms with and celebrate all the wonderful things with and cry and cry and laugh and laugh and drink and not drink with,” Philips wrote in her tribute to Williams on Instagram in 2020. “I wish we ALL could be with our friends and the people we love right now. But the thing that gives me hope (I guess) is that life is long. And there are so many more birthdays to come. And I can’t wait to be old someday with my friend and go to farmers markets in the countryside with her- my long grey hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back in a bun and she in some giant sun hat, protecting her still perfect porcelain skin.”
In addition to BFF, Philips is also the godmother to Williams’ daughter Matilda with the late actor Heath Ledger.
Courteney Cox & Jennifer Aniston
Speaking of celebrity besties who are godmothers to their kids, Jennifer Aniston is a proud godmother to Friends co-star Courteney Cox’s daughter, Coco.
Since their history-making show wrapped in 2004, they’ve been inseparable.
“Celebrating this powerful, magical, mystical, interesting, interested, ferociously talented girl today!!!” Aniston wrote in a birthday tribute to Cox in June 2024. “My sweet CC @courteneycoxofficial… she’s funny like no other, STUNNING on the inside and out.”
“I can’t imagine a world without her,” she continued. “It’s one of my great honors to call her one of my best friends for life… Happy happy birthday CC. I love you! ❤️”
Drew Barrymore & Cameron Diaz
Charlie’s Angels co-stars Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz have been joined at the hip since their acting days together in the early 2000s.
“I want to talk about body fluids for the rest of our lives and be besties and kick each other’s butts and be there in every big and small moment that life has to offer,” Barrymore hilariously told Diaz on her show.
Tina Fey & Amy Poehler
Saturday Night Live legends Tina Fey and Amy Poehler met when they did improv together in Chicago. Years later, not only had their friendship endured, but they were now co-stars on SNL.
“We just really have an ease and a short-hand working with each other,” Fey told the Today Showof their friendship. “We really came to realize that when we were doing the Golden Globes.” The pair hosted the star-studded award show four times: 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2021.
Ben Affleck & Matt Damon
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon met before becoming co-stars, but we’re sure acting and becoming famous together only strengthened their friendship. Affleck and Damon have starred in numerous projects together over the years like School Ties, Good Will Hunting, Dogma, Air, and many more.
“It’s been really helpful to check in with Ben throughout this whole surreal process over the last 25 years,” Damon once told People. “I think the shock of becoming famous is so… I mean, that messed me up for a couple of years.”
“Because the whole world just starts to treat you differently. And so your subjective experience changes,” he explained. “It’s like somebody rewrites your code in the Matrix, but just your code. It’s like, ‘Oh, my whole experience has been altered in this really overwhelming way.’ And so to have somebody who I’ve known my whole life who I can be like, ‘Hey man, is this happening to you? Are you…?’ And to check in with him, it was really, really helpful. Stabilizing.”
Affleck couldn’t agree more.
“Having Matt has meant the world,” he told the outlet of his best friend. “It’s not just Matt. It’s Matt’s dad who I adore and love enormously. He passed away recently. And his mom and stepdad, his brother. His kids, who just came to the premiere and made me want to burst into tears because they’re so beautiful and grown up and amazing.”
“You get to be part of somebody’s whole life in that way,” he said. “It’s been an enormous gift.”
Meghan Markle & Abigail Spencer
Meghan Markle and Abigail Spencer acted together in Suits but met for the first time in an audition years prior.
“It was 2007, I was doing a pilot for NBC, and I went to read with the people who were supposed to play my best friend. They were testing other actresses,” Spencer said on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I walk in, I see this beautiful gorgeous creature at the end of the table and I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ We had an immediate something, you know? And her name is Meghan Markle.”
“It was just something between us,” Spencer said. “Our friendship really developed during that time, and deepened. She’s an incredible person.”
They’ve been besties ever since!
Taraji P. Henson & Mary J. Blige
After co-starring in Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself in 2009, Taraji P. Henson and Mary J. Blige have been close friends since. Over the years, the two have been seen vacationing together and publicly supporting each other, with Henson presenting the “Icon” award to Blige at the 2017 Billboard Women in Music event, and Blige speaking at Henson’s Hollywood Walk of Fame induction in 2019.
“What I love most about her is that she is unapologetically herself,” Blige wrote about Henson for Time. “Taraji is a real woman—she doesn’t bite her tongue, and she’s not afraid to stand up for what she believes in. She’s always true and authentic, and she’s just as fearless onscreen, which is why she’s one of my favorite actors.”
“Watching her commit 1 million percent to whatever character she’s portraying is amazing,” she continued. “Her courage really sets her apart, in Hollywood and in real life.”
Jenna Fischer & Angela Kinsey
Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey not only co-starred in The Office together, but they’ve become best friends and major business partners since.
“Jenna is my life anchor because it’s like, the world doesn’t make sense until I can bounce it off her, whatever happens,” Kinsey told People of their longtime friendship. “The big things, the small things. Once I tell it to her, I’m at peace with it, or I can navigate it.”
In 2019, they released their joint podcast, Office Ladies, to talk about the show, backstage stories and more. In 2021, they also released their book, titled Office BFFs: Tales of The Office from Two Best Friends Who Were There.
Mindy Kaling & B.J. Novak
Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak became friends while writing for The Office in 2004, which they would eventually co-star in as an on-again, off-again couple. While life imitated art with the friends briefly dating, the pair ultimately decided they were better suited as besties.
In the years since, Kaling and Novak have worked on The Mindy Project, frequently attend celebrity events together, and Novak is godfather to Kaling’s children.
“The first thing I noticed about Mindy in that writers’ room is she cared so much about everything,” Novak said in his speech to Kaling for the Norman Lear Award for Achievement in Television in 2023. “Her opinions were passionate and unstoppable and she cared about all the issues of the day.”
And while the middle of his speech talking their romance, their transition into co-stars from co-writers, and much more, Novak summed it all up by the end.
“It would be tempting to tie all this together by saying how much Mindy grew up or changed since those early days. But what’s more important, is how much she didn’t change, no matter how much pressure she might have felt,” he said. “She cares so much about everything, and I care so much about her.”
Salma Hayek & Penélope Cruz
Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz have been inseparable since Hayek took Cruz under her wing after she first landed in Los Angeles to start her career as an actress.
“[Our bond] allowed us to navigate the hypocrisy and fakeness of Hollywood,” Hayek reflected to Vogue Arabia. “There were some projects that you wanted more than me and I wanted other ones more than you. We were able to negotiate it.”
The friendship isn’t just about their Hollywood careers, though, they have also navigated the “different stages of life together,” including “dating, trying to have a career, dreaming together, falling in love, getting married, having children.”
In fact, when Hayek met her now-husband French fashion entrepreneur François-Henri Pinault, Cruz was the first to know it was the real deal. “When I met François, you told me I sounded different when I talked about him,” Hayek said. “And the same with Javier [Bardem, Cruz’s husband]. I don’t know if I could call you anything other than family.”
America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively & Alexis Bledel
After starring together in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively and Alexis Bledel got three sisters for life. Throughout their careers, the four of them have supported each other, from Ferrera’s groundbreaking Barbie release to supporting Lively in her lawsuit against It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni.
“These women who I’ve had the honor of growing up with in this industry and being loved and cheered on and supported by them. Which we all do for each other,” Ferrera told Variety after her Oscar nomination. “They’re amazing, and such a gift in my life.”
Kristen Wiig & Maya Rudolph
This outrageously hilarious bestie duo has shared the screen many times during their friendship, starting with Saturday Night Live and including several movies, like the adored wedding comedy, Bridesmaids.
“It’s such a luxury,” Rudolph said about working with Wiig to The New York Times. “It’s the most fun. And it’s the thing that you can’t fabricate. The chemistry between people that are friends, that make each other laugh — it’s an indefinable, yummy thing.”
Matthew McConaughey & Woody Harrelson
First starring together in EDtv in 1999, then Surfer, Dude in 2008, and most recently True Detective in 2014, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson have been close friends for nearly three decades.
In fact, the duo even does what they like to call “friendship tours,” aka trips of just them celebrating their friendship.
“I take a ‘friendship tour’ pretty much every year,” Harrelson told Ellen DeGeneres in 2019. “I thought about calling it a ‘bender where I leech off my rich friends,’ but I thought, ‘No, you know — friendship tour, better. You just go, stay at their house, drink oblivious. Great.”
Leonardo DiCaprio & Kate Winslet
Titanic‘s shining couple Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have been close friends ever since they shared the screen together in 1997. In addition to helping each other through the ups and downs of fame, DiCaprio and Winslet have been each other’s biggest cheerleaders too.
“I continue to be awestruck,” DiCaprio said of Winslet in a premiere of her movieLee. “I continue to admire your strength, your integrity, your talent and your passion to every single project that you create.”
“I think when you experience something so seismic, so young… we really went through that together,” Winslet said of their friendship to PORTER Magazine.
Some friendships are simply unexplainable!
Alfonso Ribeiro & Will Smith
Former co-stars of the beloved ’90s TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Alfonso Ribeiro and Will Smith have remained close friends in the three decades since. The duo celebrate one another on social media, enjoy golfing together, and even surprised fans in 2013 on the set of The Graham Norton Show.
“We’ve spent many years working together, hanging together, playing together, you know, having families together,” Ribeiro told Access Hollywood. “[Will is] just a wonderful individual and we have such a great time whenever we’re together.”
Paul Wesley & Ian Somerhalder
Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder met on the set of The Vampire Diaries in 2009, and although their roles portrayed brothers at odds more often than not, the two have an amicable, close relationship in real life. From sharing an apartment building while filming TVD so they could easily run lines together to creating their own bourbon brand, Brothers Bond Bourbon, in 2021 (a nod to their brotherhood as Stefan and Damon Salvatore in The CW show), it’s clear their fictional bond has become cemented in reality.
“Our TV show ended and I can’t live without him,” Wesley told Extra of their friendship. “And I said, ‘Listen, our contract with Warner Bros. may have expired, but my contact with you is made from love. It’s eternal.’”
Sophie Turner & Maisie Williams
Game of Thrones sisters Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams met on the set of the iconic show in 2011, and they’ve been best friends in real life ever since. The girls, just 13 and 12 years old respectively at the time, grew up together while filming GOT, and they’ve shared this is what cemented their sisterhood.
The women have referred to one another as soulmates and confidants, and they even have matching tattoos of the date their roles in the HBO show were confirmed.
“My best friend Maisie, she and I have a very intense friendship, a friendship that I haven’t had with any of my other girlfriends before,” Turner once shared in a Vogue Paris video. “We felt like we wanted to write a movie about a friendship where it’s kind of like you’re soulmates, but you’re friends and it’s like this beautiful connection but it can also be quite destructive.”
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