Actress Jennifer Grey, 63, talks about her time on the hit ’90s sitcom Friends – and why it ended up being cut short.
The “Dirty Dancing” star played the role of Mindy in a single episode, who teams up with Rachel Greene – Jennifer Aniston’s character – to confront Barry’s orthodontist about his ways of cheating.
Nevertheless, Gray revealed that she was plagued with anxiety while on the show, prompting her to turn down the recurring role.
“I used to be a fan of the show and got the call to do it,” Gray said Media Village in an interview this week. “After I did it, I had such anxiety because they kept changing the script.”
She continued by explaining that it was difficult to do a guest role on the show because the whole lot was changing.
“It’s extremely hard to be a guest star because you are not a component of it and also you’re really trying to figure all of it out,” she said. “They were trying to work out what the character was like, what the scene was like, and it kept changing and changing and changing. All of it bothered me a lot that I could barely do it.”
Gray explained that she had quite a bit of “performance anxiety” at the time, although she may not have realized it at the time.
Anxiety was something she carried together with her during certain stages of her profession – including when she was asked to be on “Saturday Night Live”.
“All the time simply [felt] like I wanted to have the opportunity to do things,” she admitted. “Like once they asked me to Saturday night liveI just couldn’t. I said no.’ I used to be just too scared.
In the second season, Mindy returned for one more appearance, but this time her character was played by Jana Marie Hupp slightly than Gray, who had turned down the role.
“It saddens me that I refused to proceed either ‘Friends’ or ‘Saturday Night Live’ because of my anxiety,” Gray said.
“The reality is, I wanted people to help me overcome that sort of fear. But I could not be there until I used to be there.”
Nevertheless, since Friends, Gray has forced herself to overcome her fears and even starred in the eleventh season of Dancing with the Stars in 2010 and eventually won the competition with partner Derek Hough.
During the show, she paid homage to her “Dirty Dancing” costar Patrick Swayze by performing a Viennese waltz to the song “These Arms of Mine”, which was featured on the film’s soundtrack. Entertainment Weekly.
And it looks like Gray will proceed to try to overcome her anxiety and tackle more acting roles – last yr it was announced that she could be returning to star in the upcoming sequel to the 1987 hit Dirty Dancing.
She is going to reprise her role as Frances “Baby” Houseman.
This is not the first time “Dirty Dancing” has tried to branch out into other projects – in 2004, they made a prequel to the movie “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”, which had little to do with the original movie.
In 2017, ABC released a three-hour made-for-television remake of Dirty Dancing.