David Schwimmer has recounted a “genuinely terrifying” moment while shooting an episode of Friends when his co-star Matt LeBlanc was injured and rushed to hospital.
The Friends star rose to fame on the much-loved Nineties sitcom alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry and LeBlanc.
Speaking in a new interview, Schwimmer recalled that during a live taping of the show, LeBlanc’s character Joey was supposed to pretend to fall, but instead the actor accidentally dislocated his shoulder.
“During the live taping of the show, [Matt LeBlanc] is supposed to do a kind of a pratfall, and he actually dislocated his shoulder,” Schwimmer told Entertainment Tonight.
“He went totally white, and he stood up, and I could see his shoulder was out. He looked like he was going to pass out.”
Schwimmer remembered “immediately turning to the camera like, ‘Cut, cut, cut’”.
“That was genuinely frightening. You could see how badly hurt he was. And we had to stop filming that night, obviously, and he went to hospital,” the actor said. “That was scary.”
The actor has a starring role in the forthcoming second season of Disney+ and Hulu’s horror anthology revival Goosebumps, which will mark Schwimmer’s first time in a horror-comedy.
The Madagascar actor recently revealed a brutal decision he had to make during his early career when he turned down a role in Barry Sonnenfeld and Steven Spielberg’s Men in Black, because he had already signed up to direct a film for Miramax.
Men in Black would eventually star Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in the role originally offered to Schwimmer.
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Schwimmer admitted that if he had taken the role, it would have made him a “movie star”.
“My summer window from Friends was four months,” Schwimmer said. “I had a four-month hiatus and Men in Black was going to shoot exactly when I was going to direct this film with my company. And of course, it was an amazing opportunity…However, my theatre company and that relationship with all those people would probably have ended,” the actor.
His directing debut Since You’ve Been Gone was downgraded from theatrical release to premiering on ABC in 1998. Meanwhile, Men in Black turned Smith into one of the world’s biggest stars.
“You have to follow your gut. You have to follow your heart,” Schwimmer reflected.
“I’m really aware, whatever 20 years later maybe more, [Men in Black] would have made me a movie star. If you look at the success of that film and that franchise, my career would have taken a very different trajectory.”
