Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Brooke Shields recalls an “inside joke” of the Friends set the “you would be cancelled” for today.
The Pretty baby actress, 59, it appeared memorable in season 2 of the NBC sitcom, plays Erika, an obsessed Joey Tribbiani fan who believed that Joey – played by Matt LeBlanc – it really was Days of Our Lives character, Dr. Drake Ramoray.
On set, Shields said she was keen to mingle with the show’s famous cast – LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow and the late Matthew Perry — and copying a risqué joke that Perry would often make. However, she admits she probably wouldn’t fly today.
“You go on to a show that’s so well-oiled and so successful … I was such a fan. All I wanted was for them to like me,” the actress explained on Monday, January 13 The Scene. “I wanted to be funny. But I wasn’t in the group. They were very tight. They had all these inside jokes.”
“I watched and they had an inside joke in this one that they did a lot, and Matthew Perry did it,” Shields continued. “And I thought, ‘If I can make him laugh, it will feel so good.'”
Admitting that “you couldn’t do it now, you’d get cancelled,” Shields explained that Perry would slide across the floor “in front of a girl and pretend to look up her skirt.”
“Again, you would be canceled today,” he repeated.
To impress the cast, Shields turned the tables on Perry.
“I ran so fast from one end of the stage all the way to the other, threw myself on the ground, and pretended to look up his hollow leg,” he recalled. “Everyone was quiet. I was on the floor and I was like, ‘I just suck! I look like a crazy person!’ I’m on the floor for what felt like an hour, but it was probably a second, and suddenly he started laughing, and they all started laughing.”
Television/Getty Images Warner Bros. The cast of Friends will always remember the late Matthew Perry. “We are all so shocked by the loss of Matthew. We were more than just cast mates. We’re family,” the stars of the show, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, told Us Weekly (…)
Shields also recalled the anecdote in her new memoir, Brooke Shields Doesn’t Get Oldpublished on Tuesday, January 14.
“That afternoon they invited me to have lunch with them and go to the gym on the lot,” Shields writes, in an excerpt published by Real simple. “I had made it to Hollywood! And in the episode itself, my willingness to embrace the crazy and go hard for the laughs made an impression, too. The day after the show aired, I got a call asking me to star in my own sitcom, Suddenly Susan.”
perai die at his home in Los Angeles in October 2023 aged 54. His official cause of death was later determined to be his “acute effects of ketamine,” which is used to treat opioid use.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction or mental health, contact the national Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration at samsa.gov or 1-800-662-HELP.
