Joey is an Italian-American struggling actor who lives in New York City with his roommate and best friend, Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), and hangs out in a tight-knit group of his best friends: Chandler, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), and Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow).

Steinberg on Friends, Drea de Matteo on Joey), Tina (Lisa Maris),[4] Veronica (Dena Miceli),[4] and Cookie (Alex Meneses).

He enjoys playing video games and foosball, loves sandwiches and pizza, and is a big fan of Baywatch and Beavis and Butt-Head.

[8] He started his acting profession doing stage work, introduced in the show's pilot episode by Monica and Chandler having seen Joey in a production of Pinocchio.

Joey becomes an "actor-slash-model" when he appears on print ads for the NYC Free Clinic, as a man named "Mario" who has a venereal disease.

Published reviews of his performance claimed he was "disturbingly unskilled" and that he achieved "brilliant new levels of sucking" in a "mediocre play" with "mindless, adolescent direction".

[12] While still playing Ramoray, he also appears in a bit role as a dead man in the film Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Several episodes later, Joey costs himself the Days of Our Lives gig when during an interview with Soap Opera Digest, he radically overstates and claims he writes most of his own lines.

[13] He goes back to stage acting in season 3 appearing in a play called Boxing Day opposite love interest Kate Miller.

[14] In Season Four, he lands a small one-scene movie role as a cop, playing his scene opposite Charlton Heston.

[15] Some of Joey's other jobs have included selling Christmas trees, dressing as Santa Claus and as a Christmas elf,[16] working as a tour guide at the Museum of Natural History where Ross worked, offering perfume samples to customers at a department store, and as a Roman warrior at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Facing a dry spell in his career as an actor, Joey is persuaded by Gunther, the manager, to take a job serving coffee.

He does not like the work but, true to his nature, soon finds a way to use his position to meet and ingratiate himself to attractive women by giving them free food, although Gunther quickly puts a stop to it.

Later in season 7, Joey lands a supporting role as "Tony", a soldier, in a major film opposite an Oscar-nominated actor named Richard Crosby (Gary Oldman).

He treats the job like another acting role, in which he is "Joseph the Processing Guy" and creates a complex back-story for the character.

When Monica sees him struggle, she says she is only kidding, but Joey perseveres and with a little help from Phoebe's maternity pants, he eventually not only consumes the entire turkey but has room for dessert afterward.

He regularly sleeps with attractive women, but can never seem to get into a committed relationship – judging from a conversation he had with Chandler at the latter's bachelor party he seems to regard marriage as depressing and restrictive.

He has apparently been sexually active for a long time; he undid a 16-year-old girl's bra when he was nine, slept with his teacher in the seventh grade, and had a "wild spring break" when he was 13.

When he finds out in season 3, episode 11 that Chandler drunkenly made out with his sister Mary Angela, he attempts to force the two into a relationship.

Later, in season 8, episode 10, Joey initially attempts to force his younger sister Dina into marriage with her hapless boyfriend upon hearing she's pregnant, but they play into his emotional nature by saying they want to raise the baby independently.

He lets Rachel live with him when she is fighting with Ross, financially supports Monica and Chandler, and helps Phoebe find work when she is unemployed.

When he discovered that Monica and Chandler had developed a romantic relationship, he agreed to keep it secret until the two were ready to reveal it to the rest of their group.

However, the tension between Monica and Joey is at times fairly obvious, and it is made clear that the two have a very close, almost intimate, relationship, though it is never consummated on the show.

According to the DVD commentary of the pilot episode, Joey and Monica were initially meant to be the principal love connection of the show but were overshadowed by the Ross-Rachel relationship.

When Joey learned from a customer at Central Perk that Phoebe was apparently a porn star, he refused to watch the movies even when the other four decided to do so.

His sister Gina Tribbiani (Drea de Matteo) and his nephew Michael (Paulo Costanzo) are two other central characters in the show.

He also becomes close friends with fellow actor Zach Miller (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), and at the premiere of Captured, he repairs his strained relationship with his father.

Throughout the series, Joey develops a complicated on-off relationship with Alex Garrett (Andrea Anders), his next-door neighbor and property manager.

In the series finale, Joey becomes concerned over believing that Alex is planning for marriage too early in their relationship, only to become upset when she says she does not want to marry again.

At the end of the episode, Alex gives Joey back the piece of broccoli, implying that she may be changing her mind about marrying again.