Lisa Kudrow says the success of Friends did not spare her from being underestimated. The actor said that while she was playing Phoebe Buffay on the hit NBC sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004, “nobody cared” about her and some parts of her talent agency referred to her as “the sixth Friend.”
Kudrow said there was “no vision” for her and no expectations about what kind of career she could have, adding, “boy is she lucky she got on that show.” The comments, made in an interview with The Independent, land at a moment when Friends remains one of the most successful shows of all time and Kudrow is back in the spotlight with the final season of The Comeback, the HBO mockumentary series she leads.
The actress has long been closely tied to Phoebe, but she said the character was not an easy fit at first. In March, she told Interview magazine that people described Phoebe as “such a ditz,” even though, as Kudrow put it, “She wasn’t stupid.” She recalled saying in 1994, “I love her. She’s such a ditz,” and said it took work to make Phoebe’s choices feel right. “At first, Phoebe was very, very far from me,” she said, explaining that over 10 years “a little bit of her came into me.”
That gap mattered because Friends was not just another sitcom. It ran for 10 seasons, made stars of Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Kudrow, and helped define network comedy for a generation. Kudrow won an Emmy in 1998 for best supporting actress in a comedy series, but even then she said the outside view of her work was limited.
What sets her comments apart is the bluntness. Kudrow said that some people saw only the character and not the actor behind her, and that she had to keep finding her way into Phoebe while also being tagged by others as the “sixth Friend.” She said she later lightened up and read books on spirituality to understand the role better, and added that the character she really resonates with is Valerie Cherish, the woman she plays in The Comeback. For Kudrow, the answer is not that Friends made the rest of her career easy. It is that even after one of television’s biggest hits, she still had to prove there was more to her than one beloved part.
