The actress opens up about her ex-husband's rage due to her 'Friends' cameo.
Brooke Shields is taking a walk down memory lane. Shields was a guest on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show With Julia Cunningham to promote her new Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, and opened up about her cameo on Friends and how it enraged a famous ex.
The actress discusses her guest-star moment on the famous sitcom and the explosive reaction her then-significant other, tennis star Andre Agassi, had upon seeing the episode.
Shields portrayed Erika, a woman who starts stalking Joey Tribbiani, played by Matt LeBlanc, after becoming obsessed with his Days of Our Lives character, Dr. Drake Ramoray.
In the 1996 episode, "The One After the Super Bowl, Part 1," Joey decides to go on a date with her.
Cunningham and Cagle discuss Shields' relationship with Agassi and how he was on set as she filmed her famous Friends moment with LeBlanc.
"He sees you with Joey Tribbiani, not even a real person," Cunningham says. "Goes home and is so angry, smashes his own trophies, which is such like unhinged behavior to destroy something of his own when he's so angry at you. Which is like, I think says a lot about how that relationship was going to end."
"Unpacking that. It really had just begun too," Shields says. "And, you know, the irony of it too is that the extreme sort of behaviors were not dissimilar to what it was like living with an alcoholic, you know, and loving an alcoholic, you know, that sort of night and day that, you know, Jekyll Hyde, all that kind of stuff. So it wasn't, it wasn't really scary. I mean, I spent the next couple years trying to get those trophies all replicated."
She continues, "And you know, the thought process was, 'One day I want our kids to see their father's, you know, achievements.' ... I immediately went into that fixer mode and, you know ... take it off of him, make it OK for him. Clearly, you know, he wasn't familiar with the acting world and he got threatened or whatever the justification I tried to have, but it was so self-inflicted."
In 1997, Shields and the former No. 1 tennis player tied the knot. The couple met in 1993 and shared similar experiences with childhood fame and troubling parental relationships. However, after saying "I do" four years later, their marriage quickly deteriorated. Two years later, in 1999, Shields and Agassi divorced -- and one of the primary reasons, Shields says, was the Olympian’s substance abuse issues.
Shields also discussed on the podcast how being on Friends shifted her entire career.
"It was on the set of Friends when the bit that I wanted to do, which was the maniacal laugh," she says. "It was in that moment when people I admired, the biggest people in television at that moment, the showrunners and the actors of Friends, you know, it was mecca."
"And they trusted me and said, 'Put what you want back in.' And now they had gotten what they needed on the first pass, but then the second take, I put it back in and the energy shifted around my entire career," she shares. "And I just thought, 'Now they're paying attention. I've got this, I got it.' And I, and no one, can take this away from me."
This week, Shields also discussed another famous man in her dating life. On Tuesday, the 57-year-old actress was a guest on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show and dished on her date with John F. Kennedy Jr.
During the interview, Shields spoke about her high-profile dating life, and admitted how her team was always trying to set her up with the latest "It" boy.
"They were always trying to marry me off to a prince or like John-John," she said of Kennedy, who was affectionately known by the public as John-John.
"I was so madly in love with him, since the time I was like three, my mom would say, 'That's the boy you're going to marry, that's the boy you're going to marry.'"
Shields admitted that years later, she would finally get the chance to meet one of America's most eligible bachelors during a trip to Aspen, Colorado, where she tried to impress him on the slopes and failed.
Following the incident, which left her needing to be ski-lifted off the mountain, Shields said that she was invited by Kennedy for an outing with his family at a rowdy bar. It was there, she said, he began to fill her with compliments.
"He kept saying that I look like his mother .. which was interesting and a compliment," she recalled. "But I was like, 'I don’t know how to feel about this..' And then we did have a real date."
Shields admitted that although he tried, she did not sleep with him.
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