Friends: Who Plays Eddie & Where Have You Seen Him Lately?
"Friends" is a show about friendship (duh), but so much of the series depicts the thorny yet gratifying experience of living with roommates. Members of the core sextet live with one another in various permutations throughout the show's 10-year run (plus, Phoebe and Monica were roomies before the events of the series). In Season 2, an outsider briefly joins the group as Chandler's roommate.
Played by Adam Goldberg, Eddie moves into Joey's room when the actor's "Days of Our Lives" salary allows him to afford his own place. Over his three-episode arc, Eddie becomes increasingly unstable, revealing an unsettling temper, a tenuous grasp of reality, and a bizarre love of dehydrated fruit. When Chandler attempts to kick him out, he has no recollection of the conversation. Chandler gives Eddie a taste of his own delusional medicine by claiming he never lived there in the first place, and the former Dr. Drake Ramoray makes his triumphant return.
The three episodes aired in 1996, shortly after Goldberg had a supporting role in "Dazed and Confused." According to the actor, working on the film made him "a little snobby" and reluctant to do "Friends." Goldberg told HuffPost Live in 2015, "My agent called me and said, 'You have this three-episode arc on "Friends" that we wanted to offer you.'" He initially refused, saying that working on the Richard Linklater film "made me feel like ... 'the world is a different place for me now as an actor and I don't want to do television.'" Goldberg ultimately changed his tune. Ironically, he's become well-known for his television roles.
Goldberg currently stars on The Equalizer
Adam Goldberg didn't stay sour on "Friends" for long. "The 'Friends' thing was totally fun and completely worth it," he said in the same HuffPost Live interview. "It was idiotic of me to think for two seconds that I shouldn't have done that."
Nor did "Friends" slow down his film career as he had feared. In the years following his "Friends" gig, Goldberg appeared in films like "Saving Private Ryan," "A Beautiful Mind," and "Zodiac." More recently, Goldberg has become known for his TV roles, proving he's dropped the snobby complaints from his days as a green actor. He appeared as the antagonist Mr. Numbers in Season 1 of "Fargo," and soon after, he joined the main cast of "The Jim Gaffigan Show."
Since 2021, Goldberg has starred alongside Queen Latifah as brainy hacker Harry Keshegian on "The Equalizer." For Goldberg, who boasts a lengthy TV resume, the crime series is an entirely new experience. "I definitely feel like I've been on every conceivable type of television show you could be on ..." Adam Goldberg said in an exclusive interview with Looper. "They each bring with them different challenges and opportunities." He continued by explaining that on "The Equalizer," "there's totally different people, totally different stories, totally different nomenclature, totally different technology. I feel like it keeps me intellectually nimble, which is good. In that regard, it's a whole other kind of work."