Brooke Shields on Monday recalled her cameo on “Friends” and the lengths she went to in a bid to get the cast of the hit sitcom to like her.
The actor and model — who played Erica, who stalked Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani in a 1996 episode of the second season — said she even copied a gag that the late Matthew Perry (who played Chandler Bing) used to pull to try to connect with the show’s stars.
But she admitted of the joke, “You couldn’t do it now, you’d get canceled.”
“You go onto a show that’s so well-oiled and so successful, and I was such a fan,” Shields said on ABC’s “The View” during the promotion of her new book “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old.”
“All I wanted was for them to like me. I just wanted to be funny but I wasn’t in the group. They were very tight. They had all these inside jokes,” she explained.
Shields remembered noticing one recurring on-set joke in particular of Perry’s and thinking, “If I can make him laugh, it’s just going to feel so good.”
The joke? Perry would “run and throw himself on the floor in front of a girl and pretend to look up her skirt,” she explained.
“Again, you’d get canceled today,” she acknowledged on “The View.”
Shields said she imitated Perry but it almost didn’t pay off:
“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 and everybody was quiet. I’m on the floor and I’m like, ‘I just suck! This is so. I look like a crazy person!’ I’m on the floor for what felt like an hour, it was probably one second, and all of a sudden he started laughing and they all started laughing. And he said, ‘How did you know to do that?’ I said, ‘I’ve just been watching you and I just wanted to say thank you for giving us such humor.’ So it was really sweet.”
Perry died in October 2023 at the age of 54 following an accidental drug overdose.
Watch the full interview here: