Friends is full of celebrity appearances but forJean-Claude Van Damme, he described how "ashamed" he is of his acting skills for his "strange" episode on the popular show.
In the 1996 episode, called 'The One After the Super Bowl: Part 2,' the Belgian martial artist and actor played himself in the sitcom where Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Monica (Courteney Cox) both fancied him which led the besties to fight over him after they spotted the "Muscles from Brussels" shooting a movie in the Big Apple.
The fight between Rachel and Monica occurs when Monica doesn't have the confidence to shoot her shot with Van Damme so Rachel does it for her - only for Van Damme to be interested in Rachel.
Twenty-seven years on, Van Damme is highly critical of his performance.
“My acting is so bad. I look so like a ham. Like, ‘Hey, girls.’ […] It’s like, I’m ashamed of myself," the 63-year-old told The New York Post.
“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. They were very nice.”
While Van Damme may not be a fan of the episode, viewers at the time certainly were as it became the most-watched episode in the history of Friends with 52.9 million viewers watching after the Super Bowl.
Despite the success of the show, Van Damme didn't know much about Friends before appearing as a guest star.
“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,” Van Damme said.
“And my agent said, ‘You have to do an episode with them. So you’re going to play this guy.'”
Overall, the actor described the experiences as a "good memory" and also praised Aniston and Cox.
“They [Aniston and Cox] 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,” he continued. “It was amazing.”
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