10 TV Shows You Didn't Know Had Weird Connections

6. Friends & How I Met Your Mother

There will always be actors that end up getting typecast, while others go one further and have weirdly specific similarities between the characters they have played.

Matt Damon has found himself alone and in need of rescue in, among others, The Martian and Saving Private Ryan; the vast majority of characters played by Ryan Reynolds have his exact personality; and the great Sigourney Weaver has played a villainous figurehead working from the shadows only to be revealed at the very end in both Paul and Cabin in the Woods. However, Anne Dudek takes the cake in this particular category.

In season ten of Friends, Dudek played Precious, the girlfriend of Paul Rudd's Mike, until he dumped her in favour of Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), on her birthday, no less. Then, two years later, in just the fourth ever episode of How I Met Your Mother, Dudek appeared as Natalie, a girlfriend of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) until he too dumped her on her birthday.

If you had a pound for every separate occasion that Anne Dudek played a character who got dumped on her birthday, you would have two pounds. Which isn't much, but it is still weird that it's happened twice.