All you need is love.
“Everybody Loves Raymond” creator Phil Rosenthal recently revealed that John Lennon served as the best man at actor Peter Boyle’s 1977 wedding.
Rosenthal, 65, shared the surprising news while celebrating 30 years of “Everybody Loves Raymond” at the Paley Center in New York City on Monday.
Ray Romano (Ray Barone), Patricia Heaton (Debra Barone) and Maggie Wheeler (Linda Gruenfelder) were also in attendance.
Boyle, who portrayed Romano’s on-screen father, Frank Barone, in all nine seasons of the CBS sitcom from 1996 to 2005, died from multiple myeloma in 2006 at the age of 71.
“Two interesting things about Peter Boyle,” Rosenthal said while remembering the late actor. “He studied to be a monk when he was younger. I asked him, ‘Why’d you give it up?’ And he says, ‘There weren’t enough girls there.’”
“And the other thing is, I wonder if you know this. You know who the best man at his wedding was? John Lennon,” Rosenthal added. “He was cool, Peter Boyle.”
Boyle met his wife, Loraine Alterman, in 1974 on the set of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”
Alterman was working as a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine at the time, and Boyle, who was starring in the film as Frankenstein’s monster, allegedly asked her out while still wearing his costume and makeup.
”He actually was out of makeup when we met, but let him have it his way,” Alterman clarified during an interview with The New York Times in 2001.
The pair began dating, and they married in 1977.
Alterman, who also worked as a music critic for Rolling Stone, was friends with Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono. It was through Ono that Boyle became close to the Beatles star.
“My wife and I had a very low-key wedding,” Boyle told Philadelphia magazine just one year before his death. “At the last minute, I asked John to stand in as my best man. And he said yes. The rest is history.”
“He is John Lennon,” the actor added, noting that Lennon did not perform at the wedding. “And everything he does is memorable.”
Three years after Boyle and Alterman’s wedding, Lennon was tragically shot and killed by Mark David Chapman outside his residence at The Dakota in NYC on Dec. 8, 1980. The “Imagine” singer was 40 years old.
Meanwhile, Rosenthal revealed that he would never reboot “Everybody Loves Raymond” during the show’s 30-year reunion in NYC on Monday.
He explained that it would be “impossible” without Boyle and Doris Roberts. Roberts portrayed Marie Barone on the show and passed away from natural causes in 2016 at the age of 90.
“I’ll be honest with you, I’m a student of TV, and I’ve seen the shows that try to come back and do reboots. They’re never as good,” Rosenthal told People shortly before the reunion event kicked off. “So I’m happy with the memory.”
“It’s not the show that I miss doing,” he added. “We did it. We did 210 episodes. That’s a lot of anything. We decided to stop when we felt like it was enough. We weren’t canceled. We stopped for a reason. What I miss are my friends. That’s what I miss. All the people who made the show with us.”
Brad Garrett, who played Romano’s older brother, Robert Barone, on the beloved sitcom, said something similar when asked about an “Everybody Loves Raymond” reboot earlier this month.
“There won’t be,” Garrett said at the premiere of Disney Pixar’s “Elio” in Los Angeles on June 10. “And I’m just saying that because that’s something that Ray and Phil [Rosenthal] have always said.”
“There is no show without the parents. They were the catalyst, and to do anything that would resemble that wouldn’t be right to the audiences or the loyal fan base,” he added. “And it was about those two families, and you can’t get around that.”
Content shared from nypost.com.