Shutterstock
Freddie Prinze Jr. Reveals He Replaced Tom Hanks as Sandy on ‘Friends’ After a Scheduling Conflict
Who would have thought?! Freddie Prinze Jr.‘s role as Sandy on Friends was actually supposed to go to Toy Story actor Tom Hanks but, due to scheduling conflict, the She’s All That star got the role instead.
“I wasn’t even supposed to be [Sandy], that was originally offered to Tom Hanks but he wasn’t gonna make it back from his film on time,” Freddie, 43, recently explained to Entertainment Weekly about the 200th episode of Friends titled “The One With the Male Nanny.”
“My agent called me and said, ‘Do you want to be on Friends? And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do an episode of Friends. That’ll be great.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it shoots tomorrow,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yes, tomorrow so I’ll send you the script,'” he recalled.
Freddie had to learn his lines in less than a day but, if you ever saw the episode, you know he did an amazing job with the little time he had. Not to mention, Jennifer Aniston‘s love interest on the show, David Schwimmer, gave him a lot of helpful advice on dealing with a live audience.
“He was so cool and so passionate and he had so much energy,” Freddie recalled about David, 53. “He came into the room and was like, ‘You’re going to love this, man. It’s like a little two-act play and the crowd is so engaged, and so into it. You’ll have a ton of fun, don’t worry about a thing.’”
However, even with his great performance, Freddie doesn’t know if he’ll ever be invited to the Friends reunion. That is, if they have one.
“I have no idea if we’ll see Sandy in the reunion, you’d have to ask them that,” he joked. “If they got someone like Paul Rudd to come back in his role so we can see what he’s been up to since then, I think that would probably be more exciting.”
We don’t know what the episode what have been like if Tom played Sandy, but we do know that we liked the way it was filmed with Freddie as the lead!
