Jean-Claude Van Damme Says He’s ‘Ashamed’ of His ‘Friends’ Cameo

More than two and a half decades later, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Friends gig still haunts him.

“My acting is so bad,” the Belgian action star told the New York Post in a new interview. “I look so like a ham. Like, ‘Hey, girls.’ … It’s like, I’m ashamed of myself.”

Van Damme played himself in the 1996 Friends episode “The One After the Superbowl: Part 2,” as Monica (Courteney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) battled for a date with the actor after meeting him on a movie set.

Reflecting on that Friends episode, Van Damme told the Post his agent told him he had to take the part on the hit NBC sitcom. “I didn’t know much about the show,” he recalled. “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.”

Filming the cameo proved awkward for the Muscles from Brussels, though. “I was on the set, and those girls, they go and they kiss me, and they kiss me on the lips,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, how to do … It was strange. They were very nice.”

Related

A Writer for 'Friends' Slams the Cast in New Memoir

Still, the job “was a good memory,” Van Damme said, adding that it was “amazing” to see the Friends cast and crew at work.

“They were very open because they did the show every day,” he said. “So for them, I enter into a place where everything is working like a very well-trained mechanic engine.”

And though the actor known as JCVD has starred in films like Nowhere to Run, Timecop, and Street Fighter, it’s Friends that fans want to talk to him about. “Everybody talk[s] about that show more than all of my movies together,” he said. “Nothing wrong! But [that shows] you how strong TV can be.”