“She was always biting us”: 6 TV pets hated by their castmates

The six actors on Friends famously earned $1 million per episode starting in the show’s ninth season, but they had to put up with some adversity along the way. Back in season one, when the actors made a paltry $22,500 per episode, Ross (David Schwimmer) acquired a capuchin monkey named Marcel to help him overcome post-divorce blues. (It didn’t work: Ross was as much of a sad sack with a monkey as he was without one.) that the monkey, whose real name was Katie, messed up scenes—Katie didn’t realize she was on TV (because she was a monkey), and she constantly ate worms and vomited them up. David Schwimmer spent the most time with Katie/Marcel, which explains his strong feelings on the matter: “I hate the monkey,” he said in a . “I wish it were dead.” Not only is the monkey still alive 20 years later, she also has a on-screen—more than Schwimmer can say. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]

Since he lacks the awe-inspiring (and plot-propelling) qualities of Dany’s dragons or the Stark clan’s direwolves, Ser Pounce—Tommen’s pet cat on Game Of Thrones—serves as little more than a symbol of the child-king’s naivete. Ser Pounce is mentioned several times in George R.R. Martin’s novels, but he has only appeared once on the show, in a scene where Margaery (Natalie Dormer) comes to visit Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) in his bedroom late one night in a sexually charged power play. His symbolic purpose fulfilled, there was no real reason to bring back Ser Pounce—especially because, , the cat was kind of a jerk. In a Reddit AMA last fall, Dormer said that her feline co-star “was a bit of a diva that day, he didn’t want to stay on the bed, he was very difficult to work with.” In other words, he was a cat. [Katie Rife]

Death was commonplace on The Sopranos, and more often than not, even the loss of a friend barely elicited a solemn toast before the survivors started divvying up their interests. And if the deceased was a rat, fuhgeddaboudit—Tony Soprano and his crew wasted no tears on a fink whose name would never be spoken aloud again. This coldness even manifested off-screen when it came to the loss of Cosette, the suspiciously rat-like dog accessory of Drea De Matteo’s Adriana. Just a day after the episode in which Michael Imperioli’s Christopher offed the dog by accidentally sitting on her during a heroin binge, Cosette’s human costars were already . “She was always biting us,” De Matteo said of Cosette, whose real name, the Adam Sandler-movie-evoking Little Nicky, was apparently just one of several detestable things about her. (“She wasn’t even a full Maltese, to be honest,” De Matteo added, a cutting indictment on a show where being full-blooded Italian is everything.) Little Nicky’s trainer said that she warned the dog repeatedly to stop causing trouble or she’d end up getting whacked. Like so many other Sopranos characters, Cosette just didn’t listen. [Sean O’Neal]

After being spotted by a Today producer on a Perry Como variety hour, a young chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs became the unlikely savior of NBC’s struggling morning show. Muggs was added as a featured player on Today in 1953—about a year after its premiere—and the ratings ploy proved effective, to the eventual consternation of anchor Dave Garroway and his news team. While “Muggsy” was cute, he also became stronger, more aggressive, and more temperamental as he aged. And Garroway grew tired of the shtick, an aversion heightened by Muggs’ habit of biting the anchor’s fingers. Muggs’ trainer later that a jealous Garroway occasionally sabotaged his simian costar by slamming Muggs’ hands in a drawer or spiking his juice with drugs. It certainly wasn’t the last time there would be tensions among the Today cast, but at least Matt Lauer never slipped a mickey into his colleagues’ coffee. [John Teti]