Adam Goldberg on Friends and playing Eddie: ‘I was a snob – I told my agent, no way I’d take the part’
Everyone remembers when Chandler got a new roommate. It was 1996, and Friends was in its second season, drawing in 30 million viewers an episode. Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) had been sharing a flat, but when they fell out, Adam Goldberg’s Eddie took Joey’s place. What followed was one of the most eccentric, frenetic turns on the sitcom. Eddie might have only appeared in three episodes, but he’s become a firm fan favourite in the years since.
Fresh off the high of Richard Linklater’s 1993 come-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused, Goldberg joined Friends in season two, episode 17: “The One Where Eddie Moves In”. His final episode, number 19, was titled “The One Where Eddie Won’t Go”; a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the character’s intensity. Chandler was immediately suspicious of Eddie. He wasn’t into sport and he didn’t like Baywatch – the first red flags. But it got worse. Telling Chandler about his ex-girlfriend, Eddie cried, “It was like she reached into my chest, ripped out my heart and smeared it all over my life!” Eddie’s behaviour only got stranger from there on in.
Three decades on, after roles in A Beautiful Mind, Fargo, The Equalizer and many more, Goldberg tells me he’s so glad to have made a “small but offbeat contribution” to the Friends legacy. Speaking from his home near New York, sunlight pouring through the windows, he talks about partying with the cast in the Nineties, his speculation about a romance between Eddie and Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe, the adrenaline rush of performing to a live studio audience, and his time working with the late Perry – “When you’re with somebody who has such great comedy chops, your game just gets elevated.”
Read the full interview, below…
It’s now been 28 years since you were on Friends. How did the role come about – and did it feel like a huge deal to join the show when it was such a hit already?
It wasn’t super notable to me at the time, because I was a snob. My bread and butter, for the most part, was acting in television. That tended to be how I made my living and I did guest roles on everything – I did NYPD Blue, ER, Friends. But like I said, me and my buddies were all snobs. We did Dazed and Confused, and I remember a bunch of us were like, “Oh, we’re never doing TV again.”
I remember very specifically getting the call from my agent and them saying they were offering me this part, and that it started maybe two days later – everything’s always very fast in that world because you’re shooting an episode a week. And I was like, “No way. I’m not doing that show.” And my agent was like, “Yes, you are.”
I was sort of bound up in all these ideas of what I was supposed to be doing, and also whatever weird personal baggage I was bringing to the situation. Like, my ex-girlfriend at the time, the love of my life back then, she had a guest role on the pilot episode. So I remember really rooting to hate it. These are the sorts of things that affect your decision!
But eventually, you said yes.
I said OK. And I went and did it and it ended up being much more fun than I had anticipated.
Have you been surprised by the attention the part has got? You only put a few hours into Eddie, and yet people are still talking about it three decades later.
Somebody on the crew said to me at the time, “The day after this airs, it’s gonna be insane.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” But after the first episode aired – I don’t do anything in it, by the way, I just show up, it’s not even that funny – all these people started recognising me. I was used to some people recognising me because, in those days, if you were on TV, there were so few shows that people would know you, but this time it was just so many people.
After doing Saving Private Ryan [Goldberg played wisecracking soldier Stanley Mellish], I came back and I was like, jeez, if I’m gonna get this harassed, and be known for only having done Friends, at least I should be doing more episodes. Like, I should have another arc on the show. I remember my agent calling at the time, but it obviously never happened.
I thought they were setting something up with Lisa’s character, that’s what it felt like. That would have been really funny if Phoebe and Eddie got together.
Eddie had such preposterous storylines. What are your memories of filming?
When you’re working with somebody like Matt [Perry], who has such great comedy chops, your game just gets elevated. I keep making tennis analogies because I’ve taken up tennis again after not playing for decades, but you play better if you’re playing somebody really good. And with Matt, it was always like having a great rally.
It was a lot of fun with both of the Matts. Later, I ended up doing a bunch of episodes on the spin-off show Joey, which confuses people because, in the Friends Cinematic Universe, I’m playing two different people.
It seemed like it was almost easier to be funny around Matthew Perry – Eddie’s so absurd, and the hysteria is ratcheting up more and more, and then Chandler’s response to him is increasingly bewildered and disturbed. Perry is at the top of his comedy game in your episodes.
He’s great in those, I know. And everybody just felt that way. We’d do the run-throughs and people would be like, “This is so good.”
