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.

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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.”

When you go into any environment where you’re not a regular performer on that show, it’s always awkward. You always feel a little bit like a fish out of water. Generally, in my experience, people are always very nice, but on Friends they were especially accommodating. People were really into Dazed and Confused, which at the time was very important to me because it was the biggest and most important thing I had done.

Frustratingly, Dazed didn’t have the American Pie effect that that film had on everybody’s career, except for like [Matthew] McConaughey and Ben Affleck, but even Ben Affleck did some s***ty made-for-TV movie after Dazed and Confused. The point being that it didn’t catapult everybody into superstardom, and we all went back to the grind, so it was really nice that they were all very respectful of the work I had done up to that point. And I felt very at home.

Everybody would party after each taping and I took the Matts out on a bunch of nights.

It sounds like it was good times in the Nineties. But when you were on the show, it was in its second season, a year before Perry’s jet ski accident, which was a catalyst for his worsening addiction issues and led to an opioid dependence.

In his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote that season nine was the only year he was completely sober for a Friends season. From your perspective of being on set, is that how you remember it?

I remember hearing that and thinking back like, wow. Not even a little bit. He was super sharp.

I have friends from that era who were probably addicts at the time. But, like you say, good times in the Nineties – you’re in your twenties and it’s very hard to tell who the person just going through their twenties is and who the addict is.

Of course, what Matt was dealing with, that’s a whole other thing, when you’re dealing with opiates. Everybody I knew was either a pothead or a burgeoning alcoholic, and hopefully you would just kind of go through it. I mean, I drank every single night of that era, and it just seemed normal. All of my friends were just wasted by five o’clock and we would sit around, get a six pack and play video golf or whatever.

But with Matt, I have this one very specific memory of giving him my copy of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, which was my favourite book at the time. And I remember just joking around a lot, having a lot of really quick repartee. He was also forthcoming about things that would be somewhat personal and funny or embarrassing or whatever, but you know, nothing like that.

His self-deprecation came through strongly in his memoir.

It was disturbing to read what he was going through. There are so many people with drug and alcohol and psychological issues who are in this business. It’s surprising the extent to which I wouldn’t necessarily have pegged him for one of them, but it’s certainly not surprising that someone in that environment gets ensconced in that. I do remember wondering where he was and what he was up to afterwards.

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Do you ever watch the episodes back?

It’s always been by accident – if I happen to see it I’ll click on it. It’s weird right? I mean, it’s like a home movie in a way, it’s a snapshot in time.

Contemporaneously, I would always watch stuff that I was in – it was really important to see what I did and how I could be better. But since there’s not a thing you can do about it, you know, 30 years later, it’s generally just hard to look at. Sometimes I’m pleased, like, I really nailed that. Other times it’s just so cringy I can barely watch it.

I have these friends who live nearby, and they’re totally cool people, and we do everything together, but they’re like massive Friends fans. So it’s always a little bit funny and vaguely stalkery, because you know how people watch things to go to sleep and it’s sort of comforting? I go to bed to Brian Eno music on a loop. They go to bed with Friends. And so I pop up a lot because they watch it in constant circulation.

That must be very weird for you.

Their kid quotes me, and I don’t even know what he’s talking about, because I don’t know every line. It’s wild.

What was it like filming in front of the live studio audience at the time, and getting that instant feedback on whether a joke was landing?

You were doing a play, essentially – it’s a totally different style of acting. A lot of how the performance went seemed to be about how much adrenaline you happened to have on that particular day. And it’s totally fun. There’s nothing like that feeling.

After a joke doesn’t land, the producers huddle with you and you come up with another line, another joke, on the spot. It’s a very fluid and exciting situation and that was one of the greatest things about doing those types of shows, is you really felt like you were putting on a show.

And thinking on your feet and adapting.

I love that kind of thing. I’m a big improviser and ad libber and I love coming up with alternates to things, and sometimes the performances may suffer a little bit, in the greater scheme of “art”, but you’re doing comedy. You’re trying to get those laughs and they’re timed very specifically – there’s a laugh every X amount of lines. So as much as it feels like an adrenaline-fuelled experience, there’s also a precision. That’s what I see when I watch it back – this almost obsession with being precise.

Friends is still being watched all the time, all around the world. On the one hand, you’ve got lots of people discovering it for the first time and falling in love with it. On the other, there’s been a reappraisal of the series, with criticisms over its lack of diversity and its gay jokes.

One criticism was how the hell do these people afford to even live in New York? Their apartment is massive, and it’s an incredibly unrealistic portrayal of New York. I’m not even 100 per cent sure I knew it took place in that city.

And in terms of diversity, looking back, it seems insane. I’ve heard Black people speak about this and it’s like, you never expected to see yourself, so when you didn’t, it was not a surprise, and you ended up identifying to characters, irrespective of their race.

It was just the norm that there was such a lack of diversity. I mean, I spent a lot of my career complaining about how Italians can play Jews. You see De Niro play Jews but you very rarely see someone who’s a known Jewish actor playing Italian.

So that’s where my head was at. Or I would get feedback about not being all-American enough, which, you know, if you were to say that to somebody now you’d probably be fired. Or maybe not, because all-American has become such a derisive term.

But yes, the entire culture was like that, and television was just an amplification of that culture.

So, even though you weren’t going to accept the role, how do you feel about it all these years later?

Oh my God, I’m so happy to be part of the show’s legacy. I love it. I think about all those guys, and how incredible someone like Jennifer Aniston is, who’s managed to have this really pretty expansive career. And it’s really remarkable, because I think it must be very, very, very hard to have been part of something that was so insanely popular and not solely be identified by it.

And I am glad that I had a small but offbeat contribution to that.