David Schwimmer Recalls ‘Friends’ Costar’s ‘Frightening’ Accident

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Friends alum David Schwimmer is detailing an on-set accident that happened to one of his costars.

During the live taping of season 3, episode 2, “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Matt LeBlanc (playing Joey Tribbiani) tried to beat the late Matthew Perry (playing Chandler Bing) to an armchair — which is when the “genuinely frightening” injury occurred.

“[LeBlanc] is supposed to do a kind of a pratfall, and he actually dislocated his shoulder,” Schwimmer said in a January 2 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “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.”

“You could see how badly hurt he was,” he added. “And we had to stop filming that night, obviously, and he went to hospital.”

After the fall, Friends writers wove in LeBlanc’s sling into the following episode, pointing out that his character got injured too. However, the cast and crew had to wait until LeBlanc had healed to finish filming episode 2.

Back in 2021, LeBlanc reflected on the moment during HBO Max’s Friends: The Reunion. “I went just to jump over the coffee table and somehow tripped, and my legs went up in the air and my shoulder came out of the socket,” LeBlanc said.

“What started out as the simplest Friends episode ended up taking the longest amount of time to shoot,” the show’s producer, Kevin Bright, added.

During the reunion, LeBlanc’s other costar Jennifer Aniston joked about how he fell quite a lot throughout Friends‘ several seasons. “You tripped every time you wouldn’t look,” she said.

LeBlanc also described in a 2017 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! how his fall affected production, especially with a live audience, saying, “All those people got sent home, and then Warner Bros. had to fly them all back again.”