It’s pretty amazing to me that after 30 years of being obsessed with Friends, there continue to be bits of trivia and behind-the-scenes antics I haven’t heard. As one of the best sitcoms of all time, Friends delivered hundreds of laughs over the course of a decade, but the stories behind many of those scenes are often just as hilarious. Take “The One Where Ross Got High.” I just learned the full story behind the filming of that Thanksgiving trifle scene, and what Matt LeBlanc actually ate was so much worse than Rachel’s dessert.
Joey Tribbiani said some funny things about food during the NBC sitcom’s run, but one of the most memorable scenes came in Season 6, when Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) accidentally combined two recipes to make a dessert that was half English trifle, half Shepherd’s pie. Matt LeBlanc once talked about that scene in an interview on The Graham Norton Show, setting up the scene where the gang is trying not to let Rachel know she messed up the dessert. The actor recalled:
So Ross is saying he doesn’t like it, and Rachel hears it and it hurts her feelings, but he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings, so he eats the whole thing. He says, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s delicious,’ and eats it all. But there was too much on his plate, so he starts to eat it all and he can’t finish it, and he starts laughing.
Now it’s important to note here that David Schwimmer and the others — including two of Friends’ most beloved side characters, Jack and Judy Gellar — weren’t actually eating a dish of beef and custard. Matt LeBlanc said what the actors had was mostly whipped cream and bananas. But I’d take jam-covered peas and onions any day over what happened next. LeBlanc continued:
So we cut, and as we’re cutting, he kind of spits it back on his plate. And I’m sitting right next to him, and I’m looking the other way. I didn’t see him spit it back on the plate, right? So I take his plate, I go, ‘Give it to me,’ and I scrape some on my plate. I go, ‘Here, let’s go again.’ And we go again, and now I’m eating it, and we finished the take. No one says anything to me.
So rather than ingesting a savory dish combined with a sweet dessert, Matt LeBlanc was eating whipped cream and bananas that had been in David Schwimmer’s mouth.
That is simply nauseating. To make it worse (or better, if you’re the “ignorance is bliss” type), nobody said a word to LeBlanc or questioned him on it. In fact, it wasn’t until much later that he even learned the truth.
Matt LeBlanc went on to say that they included that whole situation in the Season 6 blooper reel (which is a special feature on the DVD set), and it was only when they showed that at the wrap party that he realized he’d gotten more than he bargained for with David Schwimmer’s leftovers.
Yuck, yuck, yuck. A lot of Friends lore has been reported over the years, but none of the tales makes me want to gag as much as this trifle backstory. If you want to check that scene out, or any others, all 10 seasons of Friends can be streamed with a Max subscription.