Can he be more charming?
Matthew Perry went the extra mile to persuade Julia Roberts to star in the 1996 post-Super Bowl hour-long episode of ‘Friends.’
“Matthew asked her to be at the show,” executive producer Kevin Bright told The Hollywood Reporter. “She wrote back to him, ‘Write me a paper on quantum physics, and I’ll do it. ‘My understanding is that Matthew went away and wrote a paper and faxed it to her the next day. ‘
The Hollywood Reporter interviewed the producers, writers and staff of the hit show before the new rerun of the epic episode starring Roberts, Brooke Shields, Chris Isaak, Jean Claude van Damme and revealed that Perry had the extra miles to win the Oscar winner. .
Roberts and Perry faxed it.
“They may have met before the episode, but she was interested in him from afar because he is so charming,” said author Alexa Junge. There was a lot of flirting about faxing. She gave him these questionnaires, such as, “Why should I go with you?” And everyone in the writer’s room helped him explain to her why. He could have done pretty well without us, but there was no doubt that we were in Team Matthew and making it happen for him. ”
Apparently the extra help worked. During the shooting, co-author Jeff Astrof recalled, “She kept saying, ‘Chandler is so funny!’ “And I’m like, ‘I wrote every single one of these rules!’ I do not know if she immediately fell in love with Matthew, but they soon started dating. I felt like Cyrano [de Bergerac]. Like, “Chandler is going out with Julia Roberts and I’m going home to my awful girlfriend.” ‘
Meanwhile, Brooke Shields did not have such a pleasant experience, thanks to her then-boyfriend (whom she would later marry) Andre Agassi.
Director Michael Lembeck told The Hollywood Reporter that the tennis players were particularly upset about a scene in which Shields licked Matt LeBlanc’s fingers.
“Brooke was with Andre Agassi at the time,” Lembeck recalls. ‘He appears on shooting night and sits in the audience with the biggest hamburger bodyguard. She does the scene where she starts licking Matt’s hand. Then I see him come down, pull Brooke aside and take her out because he’s crazy jealous. She is in tears! I broke the show for a while, and the girls took Brooke aside and loved her, cared for her, and got her back on stage. She performed excellently due to the support of the three. He was a fox. ‘