Brooke Shields is revisiting her iconic Friends cameo while sharing some insight into what it was like on the set of the ’90s sitcom. During an appearance on The View, the model and actress recalled playing stalker Erika Ford, who briefly dates Matt LeBlanc’s character, Joey Tribbiani, during his stint on the soap opera show Days of Our Lives. Shields admitted that as a fan of the show at the time, she was slightly intimidated to come into the tight-knit group.
“You go onto a show that’s so well-oiled and so successful and I was such a fan: all I wanted was for them to like me,” she said. “I just wanted to be funny, but I wasn’t in the group, you know? They were very tight. They had all these inside jokes.”
She then explained that she decided to try out one of Matthew Perry‘s famous moves. Shields had previously watched the show and remembered something that Perry’s character, Chandler Bing, would pull—though the model jokes that “you’d get canceled” for the move today.
“He would run and throw himself on the floor in front of a girl and pretend to look up her skirt,” Shields recalled. “Again, you’d get canceled today.”
In a moment of improv, Shields decided to make the bold move her own to garner some laughs from both the audience and the cast.
“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,” Shields remembered. “And everybody was quiet and I’m on the floor and I’m like, ‘I just suck! This is so… I look like a crazy person!’”
Despite Shields feeling like she was on the floor for “an hour” before anyone reacted, taking the risk ultimately paid off. “All of a sudden he started laughing and they all started laughing and he said, ‘How did you know to do that?’” she continued. “And I said, ‘I’ve just been watching you and I just wanted to say thank you for giving us such humor.’”
She committed to the bit so hard that she even gave herself brush burns. “The rug burns!” she said. “I had rug burns all over my knees!”
Shields is currently promoting her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, which has been making headlines since coming out, well, today. In one excerpt from the memoir, Shields revealed that sex has become painful at her age. “I’m going through all the bodily shit that comes with aging as a woman even in the best of times—the thinning hair and the peach fuzz and the brand-new belly fat and vaginal dryness and the diminishing sex drive—and in my natural state I feel less appealing to him than I ever did before,” she wrote. “But, on a personal level, I’m in a place where sex can be painful.”
