is implied that he got the recurring role of Ramoray by sleeping with the casting director. 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. (Originally his character was only dying in the scene but due to Joey overacting, it was changed to him being already dead.) 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. This angers the show's writers, who out of spite, "kill off" his character by having Dr. Ramoray fall down an elevator shaft. Joey takes this very hard and admits that his role on Days was the best thing that ever happened to him. He goes back to stage acting in Season Three appearing in a play called Boxing Day opposite love interest Kate Miller. The play seems to start out as a conventional drama but ends with Joey's character "Victor" being taken from his apartment by aliens. In Season Four, he lands a small one-scene movie role as a cop, playing his scene opposite Charlton Heston. Joey had some bad luck in terms of his acting career. In Season Five, he is cast in the independent film Shutter Speed, but it is shut down before filming began in Las Vegas. He was also fired from a Burger King commercial. He filmed a role in a Law & Order episode that was cut from the completed episode—Joey was only "seen" as a corpse in a body bag. In seasons 6 and 7, he lands a starring role as Detective 'Mac' Machiavelli in a very short-lived, and very bad cop show called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E, which Chandler described as "one of the worst things ever... and not just on TV." Joey had high hopes for the series, however Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E was canceled halfway through its first season. In Season 7, Joey auditions for the role of Dr. Striker Ramoray, a new character on "Days of Our Lives" and Drake Ramoray's brother, but he doesn't get that role. Eventually, Joey's luck turns when he gets back his role as Dr. Drake Ramoray and is even nominated for an award for Best Returning Character, first as a character in a coma, then revived through a