Friday, July 5, 2019

What Role did Friends' Joey play in Macbeth?

"The One Where Chandler Takes a Bath " By Vanessa McCarthy. Perf. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, and James Michael Tyler. Dir. Ben Weiss. Friends. Season 8, episode 13. NBC. 17 January 2002. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

Now there's an obscure trivia question for you. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it has an answer.

I suppose a better question would be "In what Shakespeare play did Joey from Friends have a role?" but that doesn't sound obscure enough.

Additionally, a season three episode might provide too much of a clue (for that episode, q.v.).

In any case, here's how we know what we know about Joey's Shakespearean career. We learn it when Monica and Chandler are having a conversation while Chandler is in a bubble bath (so be forewarned):


There you have it. As a side note, we can't really deduce what role he had from Monica and Chandler's comments. If it had been Macbeth, that would be a very long night indeed. But the joke might be even funnier if it were a small role. If Joey played Young Siward . . . or even "Boy, son to Macduff" . . . and that made for a long evening, that might say even more about Joey's acting ability.

Note: The image at the beginning of this post does not come from the video clip (as is usually the case). But I didn't think anyone really needed an image of Chandler in a bubble bath.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest