David Schwimmer Revisits A “Frightening” Accident On The Friends Set

“The One Where Matt LeBlanc Got Hurt” still sticks out to David Schwimmer. The Friends vet looked back on an on-set accident during a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, calling the incident “genuinely frightening” and “scary.” It all went down during a live taping of Season 3, Episode 2, “The One Where No One’s Ready,” when LeBlanc (as his character Joey Tribbiani) was trying to beat Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing to an armchair.

“[LeBlanc] is supposed to do a kind of a pratfall, and he actually dislocated his shoulder,” Schwimmer told EW. “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 quickly jumped in and called for the camera to cut. “You could see how badly hurt he was,” he recalled. “And we had to stop filming that night, obviously, and he went to hospital.”

Not surprisingly, the accident was also memorable for LeBlanc. He shared the story during HBO Max’s Friends: The Reunion in May 2021 and even had to rewatch it. “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,” he said.

LeBlanc previously revisited his fluke fall while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in April 2017 and it wasn’t just the “total pain” that he hadn’t forgotten. He said that every member in the audience that night had won a Diet Coke contest, so it made it more complicated when filming shut down early. “All those people got sent home, and then Warner Bros. had to fly them all back again,” he said.

Luckily, the actor’s injury didn’t require him to miss any episodes. The writers came up with a Joey-like accident to explain his sling: a fall while jumping on the bed in Episode 3, “The One With the Jam.” However, they did have to wait for him to heal to film the ending of Episode 2, producer Kevin Bright said during the Friends reunion.

“What started out as the simplest Friends episode ended up taking the longest amount of time to shoot!” Bright added.

Poor LeBlanc had other falls on set, too. During the reunion, the cast teased him about tripping and not looking at his marks. “You tripped every time you wouldn’t look,” Jennifer Aniston (Rachel Green) said. And sure enough, there were the outtakes to prove it — but thankfully no more injuries.