Actor Jean-Claude Van Damme admitted shame over his one-time appearance on the show “Friends.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Van Damme, 63, revealed he was unhappy with his 1996 performance on the NBC sitcom. He played himself alongside co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox.
“My acting is so bad. I look so like a ham. Like, ‘Hey, girls’…it’s like, I’m ashamed of myself,” he shared.
He added, “So then I was on the set, and those girls, they go and they kiss me and they kiss me on the lips. I didn’t know what to do, how to do … It was strange.”
However, the Belgian-born martial artist noted, “They were very nice.”
He continued:
“I didn’t know much about the show. So when I go to the show, I see those two beautiful girls and they say this is the hottest show right now in the world. So I was very glad. And my agent said, ‘You have to do an episode with them. So you’re going to play this guy.’”
During the Zoom interview with The Post, he reenacted the stance his character did during one of the scenes.
“Oh, but this was [how I looked] against the wall,” he showcased. “So I was like this on ‘Friends.’ ‘Hey, girls. What’s up?'”
Despite his self-criticism, Van Damme said his time on the show “was a good memory.”
“They were very open because they did the show every day. So for them, I enter into a place where everything is working like a very well-trained mechanic engine. It was amazing,” he shared.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, the stuntman revealed his process of picking the kind of genre he wanted to take part in for a movie.
“The first thing for me is the director. I need to meet the director and for them to tell me the story themselves,” he explained.
He continued, “They need to put me in a headlock and walk around the block — a big block, three times — saying, ‘So that’s when the women left you, and that’s where you lost total control, and why’ … so I get the full story.”
“I need to hear their truth, their imagination, and know that we like each other,” he said.
