...and Sarah Silverman too

Alan Davies says he believes Jennifer Aniston once tried to seduce him – but he messed it up.

The comic met the Friends star in 1997 when they were on the same Gala show for the Prince's Trust, with Aniston there to be interviewed on stage by Joanna Lumley.

Speaking to Katherine Ryan on her What's My Age Again podcast, the QI regular recalls: ‘She wore  this kind of gown with spaghetti straps and this flawless skin and beautiful face and the hair…

‘I did a bit of stand-up about my dog and she approached me at the after-show party –  I imagined that she was going to go past me and speak to someone behind me – and she said that she liked dogs. 

‘And I sort of… it was as if I'd had a stroke or something.  I just thought, she wants to chat about dogs. 

‘Of course, what she was trying to do was seduce me. She'd chosen me, of all the people in the party, to approach – someone who was about the right age, approximately the right size for her, sense of humour, dog lover, hair... she thought, "while I'm here in London", he could be the one for me. 

‘And then what I did was I introduced her to the cast of Coronation Street.’

The story is also in the Jonathan Creek star’s new book,  White Male Stand-Up – in which he also tells of a possible romantic encounter with Sarah Silverman at the Montreal Just For Laughs comedy festival – which he also bungled.

He wrote that after chatting for a few minutes: ‘Sarah said she needed to go to her room.

‘Oh, OK,’ I said, thinking that was that: I was too dull.

‘You can come up if you want?' she said.

So, I went with her to the elevator... then ambled along a corridor until we were alone in her room.

As she was chatting away from the bathroom, I was wondering how to turn this into a romantic liaison (why not say how funny and attractive she is) when I noticed some soft-porn magazines on the bed.

'You have a lot of porn mags, I said.

'Yeah,' she said.

'How come?'

'Read them if you want,' she said.

I picked one up and was holding it when she came out of the bathroom. She was tall, with big, dark eyes, long black hair and a kind of crooked half-smile through which she kept up a stream of witty chat, and there I was clutching a dirty book like a shoplifting teen.

'Me and my friends make up "reader's letters" and send them in,' she said.

'Are any of yours in here?'

'No, not in those,' she said.

I wanted to pay her a compliment on her appearance or suggest meeting up, but she seemed ready to go back downstairs. Bearing in mind I was twenty-nine, not fourteen, it was odd that I couldn't read the room (beautiful woman with whom you have plenty in common, as twenty-something festival delegates, invites you to read pornographic magazines alone with her in a hotel room).

My default psychological position filled the void like a factory reset: She probably doesn't want me here.

We went back downstairs.’

Published: 8 Oct 2025