On "Friends", who played Cheryl, the slob with the messy apartment, that Ross dated?

Rebecca Romijn played Cheryl, the woman with the spectacularly messy apartment whom Ross dated on "Friends." Cheryl appears as an attractive doctoral candidate in paleontology who shares Ross’s professional interests and intellectual humor.

Ross initially thinks Cheryl is an ideal match. His enthusiasm collapses when he visits her apartment and discovers clothes, dirty underwear, food scraps, packaging, and other clutter scattered throughout the rooms. The contrast between Cheryl’s glamorous appearance and her astonishingly untidy home is the episode’s central comic premise.

The mess becomes even more extreme during Ross’s visit. He finds strange goo, encounters food on the floor, and mistakes movement under a bag of potato chips for something threatening. Cheryl explains that she has a hamster named Mitzi, but the moving creature turns out to be a rat. Ross and Cheryl break up soon afterward.

Cheryl is a memorable early television role for Romijn, who was then known primarily as a model and later became widely recognized for playing Mystique in the first X-Men films. Her episode is titled "The One with the Dirty Girl," which aired during Friends’ fourth season.