Brooke Shields is recalling an “inside joke” from the Friends set that “you’d get canceled” for today.
The Pretty Baby actress, 59, memorably appeared in season 2 of the NBC sitcom, playing Erika, an obsessed Joey Tribbiani fan who believed that Joey — played by Matt LeBlanc — really was his Days of Our Lives character, Dr. Drake Ramoray.
On set, Shields said she was eager to ingratiate herself with the show’s famous cast — LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow and the late Matthew Perry — and copied a risqué joke that Perry often did. However, she admits that it 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 Monday, January 13, on The View. “I just wanted to be funny. But I wasn’t in the group. They were very tight. They had all these inside jokes.”
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“I watched and they had this one inside joke that they did a lot, and Matthew Perry did it,” Shields continued. “And I thought, ‘If I can make him laugh, it’s just gonna feel so good.’”
Admitting that “you couldn’t do it now, you’d get canceled,” Shields explained that Perry would slide across the floor “in front of a girl and pretend to look up her skirt.”
“Again, you’d get canceled today,” she reiterated.
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 pant leg,” she recalled. “Everybody 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 was probably one second, and all of a sudden he started laughing, and they all started laughing.”
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Shields also recalled the anecdote in her new memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, published on Tuesday, January 14.
“That afternoon they invited me to have lunch with them and go to the gym on the lot,” Shields writes, per an excerpt published by Real Simple. “I had made it in Hollywood! And in the episode itself, my willingness to embrace the crazy and go hard for the laugh made an impression, too. The day after the show aired, I got a call asking me to star in my own sitcom, Suddenly Susan.”
Perry died at his Los Angeles home in October 2023 at age 54. His official cause of death was later determined as his “the acute effects of ketamine,” which is used to treat opioid use.
If you or someone you know are struggling with addiction or mental health, contact the national Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration at samhsa.gov or 1-800-662-HELP.
