10 Weird Early Versions Of TV Characters You Totally Forgot About

Frank Buffay Jr., played by Giovanni Ribisi, is one of the best supporting characters in Friends, and there’s a lot of competition for that title.

He only gets better when Debra Jo Rupp teams up with him as Alice, but he actually appeared in the show fourteen episodes earlier than Frank’s debut.

In that appearance, he’s credited as Condom Guy, because he’s the strange man who accidentally tips busking Phoebe a condom, then sheepishly returns to pick it up.

There’s some debate amongst the Friends fan base as to whether Condom Guy and Frank Buffay are one and the same, or if the showrunners simply hired Giovanni Ribisi for two parts in the same season.

The evidence doesn’t really fall one way or the other. On one hand, both Frank and the Condom Guy are slightly sketchy characters, and have the same awkward nervousness to their speech.

However, Ribisi has used these tics in other parts too, and is exceedingly good at pulling that sort of role off. All things considered, it’s not definitive.

Counting against, there’s the fact that Frank doesn’t live in the city and would surely have mentioned being there recently when he learns where his sister lives. The jury’s still out.