Nearly a year after Matthew Perry’s shocking death, and several months after investigations into the ketamine-related incident resulted in multiple arrests, it’s still a difficult tragedy to fully comprehend for both fans and the actor’s many friends and former co-stars. And while much attention is obviously directed at his decade of stellar work on Friends, Yvette Nicole Brown spent three lucky seasons alongside him for CBS’ The Odd Couple reboot, and said she couldn’t contain her massive fandom when the series started.
Appearing on the podcast Behind the Velvet Rope to talk up the long-awaited Community movie and her recent Masked Singer appearance as Showbird, which even fooled former co-star Ken Jeong, Brown shared that she was a “big fan” of Friends, which debuted the same year that she moved to Los Angeles after college. So like many of us, she was just as tuned in and obsessed about the sextet’s lives and felt connected to them as a viewer.
Which made things all the more awkward when she landed the Odd Couple role opposite Matthew Perry and Reno 911 vet Thomas Lennon, saying she was initially unable to act normal until the point when she confessed to being a huge fangirl. Here’s how she put it:
So I was a big fan of Matthew’s, and I remember when I first met him, I never looked him in the eye, because I just thought I would maybe cry or fangirl a little bit too much. And we were working together a good…we got at least two episodes in, and I kindly went up and I said, ‘Listen, I'm sorry, I'm a weirdo, but I just really love you, and I think Chandler was really great.’ He was like, ‘Yvette, like, what are you doing? Like, this is me, it's fine.’ And so he kind of helped me get over my little crush, weird fangirl thing.
One can only imagine how many times Perry might have needed to have that conversation (or something similar) with the casts and crews he worked with after Friends became a permanent zeitgeist fixture. And then I can only hope that each of those interactions was similarly warm and friendly to how he handled Yvette Nicole Brown's hyper-fandom.
The way the actress put it, she was definitely put to the test in those earliest Odd Couple episodes, as she so often had to share the screen with Perry as his character's assistant Dani Duncan. In her words:
And the thing is, the first two episodes, I think, just about every scene I had was with him. So I was able to pull it together on camera, but after we would cut, I’d just kind of scurry away because I just was afraid I'd embarrass myself. I really, really was a huge fan.
For all of her nervousness in those earliest weeks of filming The Odd Couple, which also boasted Wendell Pierce as a co-star, she was able to move beyond it all, and the series went on to last for three seasons before CBS canceled it in 2017. Despite it perhaps not having the pop culture longevity of Friends or Community, Brown doesn't take her experiences on the sitcom for granted, and shared how "grateful" she is to have worked with and learned from Perry for that stretch:
I have been blessed in this career to get to steal from the best, and when I tell you that Matthew Perry is one of the finest comedic actors this world was ever gifted with, he truly is. So I would just sit like this and just grab what I could. . . . It was an embarrassment of riches on that set, and Matthew was the grand poobah over there. So I’m really grateful that my life crossed paths with him for a short period of time. I’m very grateful to have those memories of him. He was a wonderful, loving man.
As fans wait to see what her Community character Shirley has been up to, Brown can be seen or heard in a variety of current projects and upcoming TV shows, from Inside Out 2 to the Among Us animated series to the action comedy Code 3 with Rainn Wilson to the crime crama The Family Business New Orleans. Anyone who wants to catch back up on The Odd Couple will need Fandango at Home so stream it.