The actress admitted that there was no way anyone could pull the stunt these days, adding, “You’d get canceled.”
Brooke Shields is looking back at the time she successfully made Matthew Perry laugh while guest-starring on Friends.
The model and actress, who infamously played Joey’s stalker Erika in season 2 of the beloved NBC sitcom, revealed on Monday’s episode of The View that she desperately wanted to become, well, friends with the Friends cast and so she attempted to win them over by putting her own spin on one of Perry’s gags during filming.
“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,” Shields confessed. “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.”
Shields noticed one stunt in particular that Perry would often pull on set. “He would — you couldn’t do it now, you’d get canceled — he would run and throw himself on the floor in front of a girl and pretend to look up her skirt,” Shields recalled as The View hosts laughed. “Again, you’d get canceled today.”
So, in an attempt to fit in, she tried the bit herself. “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 said. “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!’”
The Mother of the Bride actress said it felt like she was on the floor for “an hour” before anyone reacted to her stunt. “All of a sudden he started laughing and they all started laughing and he said, ‘How did you know to do that?’” she recalled. “And I said, ‘I’ve just been watching you and I just wanted to say thank you for giving us such humor.’”
While the move may have gotten her into the Friends friendship circle, it did come with its own consequences. “The rug burns!” Shields lamented. “I had rug burns all over my knees!”
Shields’ character, Erika, was a mentally ill woman who, in season 2’s two-part episode “The One After the Superbowl,” begins dating Joey while mistakenly believing he is actually his Days of Our Lives character, Dr. Drake Ramoray. When she confronts him about cheating on her with another character on the show, the group tells her that Joey is actually Drake’s evil twin brother, Hans, in an effort to break them up.
The actress was one of several guest stars who made an appearance during the double-length episode alongside Chris Isaak, Julia Roberts, Dan Castellaneta, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Shields’ walk down memory lane comes just over a year after Perry died at 54 from the acute effects of ketamine. She isn’t the only one who has recently shared memories about the late actor, either. Just last week on The Drew Barrymore Show, Lisa Kudrow shared that she discovered a note from Perry tucked inside one of the props she took home after Friends ended its 10-season run in 2004.
“I recently found the note that he had in it for me. I hadn’t opened it up or looked inside of it, but yeah, he did,” Kudrow said. “He had a note in there and I forgot about it. Timing is everything.”
