This Iconic Friends Scene Was a Nightmare For Matt LeBlanc Who Still Has PTSD From It
It’s all fun and games when you watch Friends back home, but on the set, some iconic scenes actually dealt significant emotional damage to the stars of the show.
The 10 seasons of Friends contain an unfathomable amount of fun and joy for viewers all over the world to experience (and then keep re-experiencing every time they feel down).
On the set, the lead actors had a lot of fun, too, seeing how they were great friends who enjoyed pranking each other and fooling around together.
Some of the most iconic scenes of the show provided even funnier bloopers and inside jokes; others were born from something that happened behind the scenes.
However, there were moments that, despite being adored by the audience, were traumatizing for the actors themselves…luckily, in a pretty funny way, too.
One of the scenes every person who’s ever watched Friends will remember till the end of their days is Rachel’s dessert, and it belongs in both categories. While Rachel’s legendary trifle with meat was born thanks to the behind-the-scenes confusion of the writers who couldn’t remember the correct recipe themselves, it also dealt raw psychic damage to Matt LeBlanc, though for a different reason.
There’s this one moment when Joey — the only person who genuinely enjoys the perverted dessert — takes the food from Ross’s plate and eats it. Few viewers know that right before that, there was an off-screen moment where David Schwimmer spit out his piece…which went completely unnoticed by Matt LeBlanc. Yikes.
“[David] starts to eat it all and he can't finish it and he starts laughing, so we cut. As we’re cutting, he kind of spits it back on his plate. I’m sitting right next to him, and I’m looking the other way. I didn’t see him spit it back on his plate. I scrape some on my plate, and I go, 'Here, let's go again.' And we go again. And I'm eating it and we finished the take. No one says anything to me,” LeBlanc recalled on The Graham Norton Show.
Ew. Gross.
The funny part is, Matt didn’t even realize what he ate until he saw this moment in the bloopers section later down the line. By that time, of course, it was too late. We can only hope that the actor didn’t feel too sick after watching the video for the first time and processing what really went down back then.