Joseph Francis Tribbiani Jr. is a fictional character, serving as one of the primary characters of the NBC sitcom Friends and the protagonist of its spin-off Joey. He is portrayed by Matt LeBlanc in both series.
Joey is an Italian-American struggling actor who lives in New York City with his roommate and best friend, Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), and hangs out in a tight-knit group of his best friends: Chandler, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), and Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow). He lived with a few other roommates when Chandler moved out to move in with Monica.
Joey once mentioned being 13 in 1981. He is from Queens, New York and is Catholic. Joey comes from a working-class Italian-American family of eight children, of which he is the only boy. His father Joseph Tribbiani Sr. (Robert Costanzo), is a pipefitter, and his mother's name is Gloria (Brenda Vaccaro). Joey has seven sisters: Mary Therese (Mimi Lieber on Friends) a.k.a. Mary Teresa (Christina Ricci on Joey), Mary Angela (Holly Gagnier), Dina (Lisa Melilli in The One Where Chandler Can't Remember Which Sister, Marla Sokoloff in The One with Monica's Boots), Gina (K.J. Steinberg on Friends, Drea de Matteo on Joey), Tina (Lisa Maris), Veronica (Dena Miceli), and Cookie (Alex Meneses). As a child, he was extremely accident-prone. In "The One with Ross' New Girlfriend", it was implied that he was sexually abused by his tailor but did not realize it until Chandler went to the same tailor.
Joey is portrayed as promiscuous and dim-witted but good-natured, as well as very loyal, caring, and protective of his friends. The writers of Friends did not intend his character to be stupid, but Matt LeBlanc played "dim-witted" so well that it became a part of the character. He is a food-loving womanizer who has had more luck with dates than any of the other group members. In contrast to his persona as the "ladies' man", he has also a marked childish side. He enjoys playing video games and foosball, loves sandwiches and pizza, and is a big fan of Baywatch and Beavis and Butt-Head. As a struggling actor, he is constantly looking for work. He was ordained as a minister in "The One with the Truth About London" and officiated at Monica and Chandler's wedding. And also, Phoebe and Mike's wedding in Season 10.
He does not like sharing food, especially when it is pizza, and has difficulty with even simple mathematics. In sports, Joey likes the New York Yankees in baseball, New York Knicks in basketball, New York Giants in football, and the New York Rangers in hockey.
Contents
Appearances
Joey Tribbiani is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, having refused to follow in his father's foot steps and become a pipefitter. He started his acting profession doing stage work, introduced in the show's pilot episode by Monica and Chandler having seen Joey in a production of Pinocchio. Sometime before the start of the series, Joey also had appeared in a porn film, as a fully clothed extra. Joey also mentioned appearing in a play with trolls before getting the leading role of Sigmund Freud in the musical play Freud!, where he was first spotted by his talent agent Estelle Leonard. She immediately got him a film role in the same episode as Al Pacino's "butt double" – a speechless role he later lost due to taking the part too seriously. By then, he said, he had been doing "nothing but crappy plays for six years". Monica and Chandler also once discussed having seen Joey in a version of Macbeth, in which he was unable to pronounce most of the words.
Season 1
Joey becomes an "actor-slash-model" when he appears on print ads for the NYC Free Clinic, as a man named "Mario" who has a venereal disease. He also did an infomercial for a device that allows milk to be poured out of milk cartons; he played "Kevin", a man who had extreme difficulty opening the cartons without the use of the device. ("Kevin" also inadvertently choked on a cookie during the show). This haunted him again when he appeared in the play The King, where he was made fun of due to choking on a cookie.
Season 2
In Season Two, Joey continued his stage work, appearing as "The King" in a poorly reviewed (and never-named) play. Published reviews of his performance claimed he was "disturbingly unskilled" and that he achieved "brilliant new levels of sucking" in a "mediocre play" with "mindless, adolescent direction". Only days after these reviews came out, Joey gets his big break when he lands his first major role as Dr. Drake Ramoray on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, a real-life television show outside of the context of Friends which featured Jennifer Aniston's father John. In-universe, Joey had initially gone in to read for a one-shot role as a cab driver; it is implied that he got the recurring role of Ramoray by sleeping with the casting director. While still playing Ramoray, he also appears in a bit role as a dead man in the film Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Originally his character was only dying in the scene but due to Joey overacting, it was changed to him being already dead.)
Several episodes later, Joey costs himself the Days of Our Lives gig when during an interview with Soap Opera Digest, he radically overstates and claims he writes most of his own lines. This angers the show's writers, who out of spite, "kill off" his character by having Dr. Ramoray fall down an elevator shaft. Joey takes this hard and admits that his role on Days was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Season 3
He goes back to stage acting in season 3 appearing in a play called Boxing Day opposite love interest Kate Miller. The play seems to start out as a conventional drama but ends with Joey's character "Victor" being taken from his apartment by aliens. In Season Four, he lands a small one-scene movie role as a cop, playing his scene opposite Charlton Heston.
Some of Joey's other jobs have included selling Christmas trees, dressing as Santa Claus and as a Christmas elf, working as a tour guide at the Museum of Natural History where Ross worked, offering perfume samples to customers at a department store, and as a Roman warrior at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Joey is also briefly employed at Central Perk as a waiter. Facing a dry spell in his career as an actor, Joey is persuaded by Gunther, the manager, to take a job serving coffee. At first, Joey tries to hide his new job from his friends, but they eventually figure it out. He does not like the work but, true to his nature, soon finds a way to use his position to meet and ingratiate himself to attractive women by giving them free food, although Gunther quickly puts a stop to it. Joey does not take his job seriously, and spends a lot of his working hours sitting and talking to his friends. Eventually, he is fired for closing the coffeehouse in the middle of the day to go to an audition while Gunther was running a personal errand. Rachel later persuades Gunther to give Joey back his job, but once Joey finds more steady acting jobs he eventually just stops showing up. His absence is barely noticed. In a later episode, Joey realizes he forgot to tell Gunther he quit; Gunther replies that he would have eventually fired him anyway.
Season 5
Joey has some bad luck in terms of his acting career. In Season Five, he is cast in the independent film Shutter Speed, but it is shut down before filming began in Las Vegas. He is also fired from a Burger King commercial. He films a role in a Law & Order episode that was cut from the completed episode—Joey is only "seen" as a corpse in a body bag.
Seasons 6 and 7
In seasons 6 and 7, he lands a starring role as Detective "Mac" Machiavelli in a short-lived and bad cop show called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., which Chandler described as "one of the worst things ever... and not just on TV." Joey has high hopes for the series; however, Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E. is canceled halfway through its first season.
In Season 7, Joey auditions for the role of Dr. Striker Ramoray, a new character on "Days of Our Lives" and Drake Ramoray's brother, but he does not get the role. Eventually, Joey's luck turns when he gets back his role as Dr. Drake Ramoray and is even nominated for an award for Best Returning Character, first as a character in a coma, then revived through a brain transplant with another character, Jessica Lockhart (played by Susan Sarandon).
In Season 7, he later replaces Lockhart as Dr. Drake "Jessica" Ramoray. Later, in the spin-off Joey, it turns out that he loses his role as Dr. Drake Ramoray and has to again hunt for a new job.
Later in season 7, Joey lands a supporting role as "Tony", a soldier, in a major film opposite an Oscar-nominated actor named Richard Crosby (Gary Oldman). The film is a World War I period film entitled Over There. Later Chandler accompanies Joey to the premiere of the film.
Appearance in other seasons
Joey is also briefly a sperm donor for a medical experiment; at the end, the hospital would pay any donor $700. This is later mentioned when Monica goes to a sperm bank. Joey finds to his dismay that his sperm is not popular.
He also works at the restaurant "Alessandro's" where Monica is head chef, nicknaming himself "Dragon" while on the job. Monica hires him just so she can fire him to intimidate the other employees who pay her no respect, but he makes a lot of tips and backs out of the deal, only to realize how important his getting fired was to Monica. He then sets himself up to be fired the next day.
He spends one episode working with Chandler as an entry-level data processor. He treats the job like another acting role, in which he is "Joseph the Processing Guy" and creates a complex back-story for the character. Chandler begins to dislike the Joseph character when he starts showing up Chandler at work. Joey eventually leaves after Chandler pretends to be sleeping with Joey's "pretend wife".
Prior to Monica and Chandler's wedding, when the two admit that they were having trouble finding someone to perform the ceremony, Joey volunteers for the role, subsequently getting himself ordained over the Internet to entitle him to perform the marriage. He has apparently retained this role until Season Ten when he performed the ceremony for Phoebe's wedding.
Joey is characterized as a simple-minded but good-natured womanizer who loves food. He particularly loves meatball sub sandwiches. When asked if he would give up sex or food, he has trouble deciding and keeps blurting out sex or food, eventually yelling "I want girls on bread!". In "The One with the Ride Along", he appears to be saving Ross from a putative gunshot, when it was actually his meatball sandwich that he was trying to save; it just happened to be next to Ross. He also loves the "Joey Special" – two pizzas. His greed when it comes to food is also shown in the episode "The One with the Birth Mother" where he refuses to call Sarah the next day. When Phoebe asks why, Joey explains how Sarah broke his golden commandment on their date – not to share food. Phoebe is shocked, to say the least, but Rachel admits to her how this is who Joey is. Nonetheless, Phoebe makes Joey go out with Sarah again, making him order extra fries should the need arise. Joey does so, but Sarah really wants to dig in his seafood platter, making him drop his plate to the floor in the process. He exclaims, "Joey doesn't share food", which she seems to understand. However, things change course when Joey wants to nibble at her chocolate torte. As he wouldn't share his food with her, she reciprocates and warns him not to touch any of her desserts while she wanders off to take a call. When she arrives, her dessert is pretty much gone; Joey, with chocolate torte all over his face, is at peace with himself, and admits that he's "not even sorry!". In "The One with the Cheap Wedding Dress," Ross implies that Joey eats a date's food without her permission regularly.
Relationships
The major development of their relationship was when Joey fell in love with Rachel, Ross's ex-girlfriend, and Ross's love interest since the ninth grade. When Joey goes on to tell Ross about it, he cannot say it in his face and instead says that he loves his "friend's" ex-girlfriend. When asked if that "friend" (Ross) is a good guy, Joey honestly answers "Yeah...He's the best." Initially, it causes a major rift, with Joey being apologetic, but when Ross sees Joey truly in love with Rachel, he gives him the go-ahead. Ross basically says that he is not okay with it but he wants to be, and the two's friendship deepens due to Joey's refusal to date Rachel unless Ross okays the deal. However, Joey and Rachel do not date long, and later, Joey encourages Ross to pursue Rachel in the season finale.
Joey and Monica are close friends often joking around with each other. Joey allowed Monica to hire and fire him to prove to her employees that she was not a pushover. When he discovered that Monica and Chandler had developed a romantic relationship, he agreed to keep it secret until the two were ready to reveal it to the rest of their group. In an episode where he sees how close Chandler and Monica are, he dreams of himself and Monica in the same way. This later causes him to act weird around Monica. Finally, he reveals this to Chandler and Monica, it is that he wants a relationship like that, but Monica finds it nice thinking Joey thought of the two of them together. He also called Chandler moments after suspecting Monica of having an affair with a mystery male he had heard in her apartment. When Monica and Chandler needed their Engagement Picture taken, Chandler could not smile. In the newspaper announcement, it showed the photo was of Monica and Joey.
Joey always enjoyed a close relationship with Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe; LeBlanc once speculated that Joey saw the girls as sisters more than potential romantic interests. However, the tension between Monica and Joey is at times fairly obvious, and it is made clear that the two have a very close, almost intimate, relationship, though it is never consummated on the show. According to the DVD commentary of the pilot episode, Joey and Monica were initially meant to be the principal love connection of the show but were overshadowed by the Ross-Rachel relationship. In Episode 1.07 "The One with the Blackout," Phoebe blurted to Joey that Monica had a crush on him when he was moving in with Chandler. In the Season 3 episode "The One with the Flashback", an instant attraction appears to form between Joey and Monica when they first meet (to the point that Monica silently thanks Chandler for choosing him as a roommate), but after Monica invites Joey inside her apartment for some juice and Joey misinterprets it as Monica wanting sex and subsequently undressing in front of her, she is put off and they instead remain friends. This idea was revisited in Season 7 when it is revealed that Monica initially meant to hit on Joey in London, and not Chandler. She states that it was because she was looking for something meaningless, never expecting to have found Chandler and fall in love with him. The concept of what their marriage would have been like was then envisioned by Phoebe and it consisted of Monica cooking constantly for an obese Joey.
Joey
After the final season of Friends, he becomes the main character of Joey, a spin-off/sequel series, where he moves to L.A. to further his acting career. His sister Gina Tribbiani (Drea de Matteo) and his nephew Michael (Paulo Costanzo) are two other central characters in the show.
Joey turns down a role in a sitcom called Nurses to star in a different series pilot. His pilot does not get picked up, while Nurses becomes a huge hit. However, his acting career has had some better moments. In Joey, it is revealed that Joey's character of Dr. Drake Ramoray dies again on Days of Our Lives where he is stabbed by a nurse ("Joey and the Wrong Name"). He wins a Daytime Soap Award for "Best Death Scene". In later Joey episodes, Joey lands a starring role on the prime time soap Deep Powder. When he gets fired from that job, he bounces back by snagging a leading role in the big-budget action film Captured. He also becomes close friends with fellow actor Zach Miller (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), and at the premiere of Captured, he repairs his strained relationship with his father.
Throughout the series, Joey develops a complicated on-off relationship with Alex Garrett (Andrea Anders), his next-door neighbor and property manager. They become good friends upon meeting and Alex confides her problems with her marriage in Joey. At the end of season one, she and Joey become romantically involved during her separation from her husband. In season two she becomes romantically interested in Joey and has a crush on him for a long period. Gina tries to help her to get over Joey, but once Alex starts dating Joey's friend Dean, Joey soon realizes that he is also in love with Alex, and they slowly form a committed relationship. In the series finale, Joey becomes concerned over believing that Alex is planning for marriage too early in their relationship, only to become upset when she says she does not want to marry again. When the two argue about the situation, Alex compares his attitude to him not wanting a piece of broccoli until the second she denies it from him. This argument culminates in them nearly marrying out of spite until they make up when he admits to her that she is the first girl he has ever wanted to marry. At the end of the episode, Alex gives Joey back the piece of broccoli, implying that she may be changing her mind about marrying again.