Brooke Shields recalls the “inside joke” from Friends set “will cancel you” for today.
The Beautiful baby actress, 59, unforgettably appeared in Season 2 of the NBC sitcom, playing Erika, an obsessed fan of Joey Tribbiani who believed that Joey — played Matt LeBlanc — it really was his Days of our lives character, dr. Drake Ramoray.
On the set, Shields said she couldn’t wait to warm to the show’s famous cast – LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow and late Matthew Perry – and copied a risque prank that Perry often did. Still, she admits she probably wouldn’t fly today.
“You go 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 View. “I just wanted to be funny. But I wasn’t in the group. They were very tight. They had all these inside jokes.”
“I was watching and they had an inside joke 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 he “couldn’t do it now, he’d be fired,” Shields explained that Perry would slide on the floor “in front of the girl and pretend to look up her skirt.”
“Again, they would cancel you today,” she repeated.
To impress the cast, Shields turned Perry.
“I ran so fast from one end of the stage to the other, threw myself on the ground and pretended to look at his pants,” she recalled. “Everyone was quiet. I was on the floor and I was like, ‘I’m just shit! I look like a crazy person!’ I was on the floor for what seemed like an hour, but probably a second, and all of a sudden he started laughing, and everyone started laughing.”
Warner Bros. Television/Getty Images The cast of Friends will always remember the late Matthew Perry. “We are all completely devastated by the loss of Matthew. We were more than acting colleagues. We are a family,” said the stars of the series Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer to Us Weekly (…)
Shields also recalled the anecdote in her new memoir, Brooke Shields must not agepublished on Tuesday, January 14.
“That afternoon they invited me to have lunch with them and go to the gym in the parking lot,” Shields writes, according to an excerpt he posted. Really simple. “I made it in Hollywood! And in the episode itself, it also left an impression on my willingness to embrace the crazy and to laugh hard. The day after the show aired, I got a call asking me to star in my own sitcom, Suddenly Susan.”
Perry died at his home in Los Angeles in October 2023 at the age of 54. His official cause of death was later determined to be “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 samhsa.gov or 1-800-662-HELP.