Photo: YouTube / The Late Late Show With James Corden
James Corden once said that, despite the fact that he occasionally has his Carpool Karaoke Range Rover towed by a truck when he’s filming with a celebrity inside, he still deserves credit for driving the rest of the time. Well, not on this occasion he doesn’t.
To further drum up interest in the historic Friends reunion, which premiered on HBO GO at the end of last month, Corden introduced a new Carpool Karaoke segment in his latest Late Late Show episode. Corden served as host for the reunion, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he got some extra footage with the world-famous six stars of the Friends series, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer.
Or, for that matter, that he’s willing to play it up for extra drama. “A drive with [them] nearly end[ed] in tragedy,” reads the description of the video, while James himself sighs at the 4.58-minute mark, “Honestly, I just nearly killed the cast of Friends!”
In earth-shattering news (lol, no), nothing on TV is what it seems. There was no close brush with death, even though Aniston admits that she “really did think we might perish for a second” right after the supposed incident. As you can see in the video below, it all starts very innocently (and scripted-ly) with Corden driving a golf cart on the Friends set on the Warner Brothers lot. It’s a big one, so you can anticipate what is about to happen.
Corden starts picking up Friends actors, starting with Cox and Kudrow, and ending with Scwhimmer and Perry. Since this is meant like a brief episode of Carpool Karaoke, he gets them to sing along to the Friends theme song, and asks them some of the questions that have been on fans’ minds all these years (20, to be more exact), since the show ended its original run.
Then, he invites them to grab coffee and, once they pull up, he seemingly forgets to put the cart in park, as he jumps out of it. The cart rolls a couple of feet at most, while the six actors inside, still seated, yell at Cordon to step on the brakes. It’s nothing tense or dangerous, and it was probably rehearsed in advance: no one puts the most lucrative TV cast of all times on the same golf cart to endanger their lives. At least, not when there’s a reunion episode still shooting.
In the end, this was probably a silly joke, allowing Corden to play it up for added drama. He’s never shied from this type of stuff, and he’s not about to start now. But if he did slip up and really forgot to put the cart in park, it’s probably because he truly was overwhelmed and caught in the moment, having been a fan of the series for so long.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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