Lisa Kudrow: ‘Friends is still great. Matthew Perry was a genius’

Everyone knows the US sitcom Friends is more popular now than it has ever been. The show ended in 2004 but it’s still one of the most watched series in the UK. The five surviving cast members — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc (Matthew Perry, aka Chandler, died in 2023) — each earn $20 million (£15 million) a year from repeat fees. Why?

“Because Phoebe Buffay was so great?” Lisa Kudrow speculates with a twinkle. And sure, Kudrow’s unforgettable guitar-playing ditz singing her song Your Love (“Your love is like a giant pigeon crapping on my heart”) was a big part of it.

But there was something else.

“After Matthew died I watched the show again,” Kudrow says, more serious now. “Before, I only saw what I did wrong or could have done better. But for the first time I truly appreciated just how great it was. I felt I did OK, but Jennifer and Courteney? Amazing. David and Matt? They had me laughing so hard. And then Matthew — he was just beyond us all.”

“Friends captured a kind of innocence. But there was mean stuff behind the scenes” tom jackson for the times magazine

Even that’s not the full story. Gen Zers born after Friends ended love the show maybe because the story of six youngsters living pre-social media lives has a prelapsarian innocence. At their Central Perk hangout, no one has laptops or smartphones; they chill on the sofa actually talking, flirting, having fun.

Sure the internet existed, but it was still new enough for Chandler to get freaked out by a message from a “cyber chick”.

“Yes,” Kudrow says. “Friends captured a kind of innocence that maybe a younger generation has never got to experience.”

But was it really that innocent?

“Oh no, there was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes,” Kudrow says.

Famously, the cast were all friends in real life. At the start they were each paid $22,500 an episode, but instead of competing they negotiated as a team to secure $1 million an episode by the end. Kudrow, educated at the elite Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, reportedly took a lead in the discussions. As a result she, Aniston and Cox became the highest-paid television actresses in the world at the time.

The cast of Friends at the Emmy awards in 2002 Reuters

But Kudrow, 62, is talking about the show’s writers’ room on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, where the show was filmed. She says it contained 12-15 staff, mostly men, some of whose gags have made it into the culture (“Oh. My. God” as an expression of melodramatic outrage and, “We were on a break,” as an excuse for philandering originated in that room). And yet …

“Don’t forget we were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response they could be like, ‘Can’t the bitch f***ing read? She’s not even trying. She f***ed up my line.’ And we know that back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense.”

In 1999 there was a sexual harassment court case brought by writers’ assistant Amaani Lyle, whose job it was to transcribe brainstorming sessions. She was shocked to hear Friends writers discussing sleeping with Aniston and Cox, feigning masturbation and receiving oral sex.

Crucially, Lyle lost the case. At the time it was seen as a victory for creative freedom for the writers of one the most popular TV shows of all time.

“Oh, it could be brutal, but these guys — and it was mostly men in there — were sitting up until 3am trying to write the show so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter,’ ” Kudrow says, waving her hands in front of her face with Phoebe-like distaste.

Why does any of this matter now? Fast-forward two decades and I am meeting Kudrow in London to discuss the return of her HBO Max sitcom, The Comeback, which last aired in 2014. She co-wrote the show with Michael Patrick King, a key writer and director for Sex and the City, and it centres on Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom star desperate to relaunch her career. Cherish is also filming a reality show about her attempts to become relevant again. In one scene, she discovers the heroin-addicted writer on her show has written a story in which she must give a blow job to the actor Seth Rogen (The Comeback is stuffed with cameos) while zoned out on diet pills.

“Michael had all that experience from Sex and the City and we kind of encouraged each other to explore the dark side a little bit,” Kudrow says.

I should say. King’s take on the subject is pretty uncompromising. “TV writers perceived any woman over 40 as not f***able,” he has said about the inspiration for The Comeback. “It’s in the DNA of many, many writers’ rooms. The show is the closest thing to my experience of writing rooms, with male energy and the sophomoric madness that happens when people are trapped, trying to do a series.”

With Damian Young in The Comeback — the third season is streaming now

“Yeah,” Kudrow says. “We’re showing you how the sausage gets made.”

Welcome to the post-Friends world. This is the one where Kudrow lifts the lid on the bonkers, sometimes toxic experience of screen fame. The Comeback has an intriguing history. It was conceived as soon as Friends ended in 2004 and its central character dates from Kudrow’s days in a Los Angeles improv company called the Groundlings (American television legend Conan O’Brien was also a member).

“Valerie was this very mannered Valley Girl actress who kind of knew nothing but wanted to save the planet,” Kudrow recalls.

Inspired by The Office plus “meta showbiz” series like The Larry Sanders Show (the seminal Nineties sitcom was set in the world of late-night TV) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (King played a publicist in the pilot), Kudrow and King decided to place Valerie in the world of reality TV.

“Because that was what TV looked like after Friends,” she explains. “The schedules got filled by things like Survivor [an American reality competition now entering its 50th season]. The guy who won the first series was devious — not a nice human. But they gave the $1 million prize to him. I thought, ‘This is the end of civilisation.’ ”

Kudrow has previously called that first Survivor winner, Richard Hatch, “despicable” and he recently hit back.

“I’m disappointed in Lisa. It is ironic that someone so richly rewarded for playing roles and celebrating superficiality feels comfortable imagining she has any idea who I am,” he told a journalist.

With her husband, Michel Stern, in 2015 Getty Images

Anyway, it wasn’t just that Kudrow was outraged that reality TV rewards bad behaviour. The first season of The Comeback foresaw just how damaging the pursuit of fame at all costs would be.

“When The Comeback started, the idea that people would humiliate themselves and sacrifice all dignity for anything was still quite new,” she says. “At least with Friends we experienced incredible success with each other. We took care of one another. How you survive that level of exposure and degradation alone is just a mystery to me.”

The poster for the first season of The Comeback showed Kudrow being fed into a mincer. But not all reality stars have perished. The US president is one himself (The Apprentice) and several key positions in the White House have been occupied by alumni of shows like Dancing with the Stars and Celebrity Big Brother.

“Yeah, who saw that coming?” Kudrow marvels with Phoebe-like wonder.

The first season of The Comeback was nominated for Emmys and David Bowie even declared himself a fan. But US TV commissioning is brutal. When the show didn’t win, it was cancelled the same evening. What was the problem with it?

“A lot of people felt that a show in which an aspiring woman gets humiliated was tough to watch,” Kudrow explains. “That was news to me, because I thought women could be just as ambitious as men. But a producer on another show said it’s like making jokes about disabled people. Obviously you don’t do it and, at that time, women were seen as victims.”

At an awards ceremony with Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston in 2019 Getty Images

By 2014, though, scripted reality shows like The Real Housewives were dominating schedules, and social media platforms such as Instagram (launched in 2010) provided a space for self-promotion like no other. Valerie Cherish now made complete sense. The Comeback was hastily recommissioned.

“Michael and I had years of critics whispering, ‘Your show was great. Why did it get cancelled?’ And then suddenly everyone else was saying, ‘OK, we get it now,’ ” Kudrow says.

Season two was possibly a bit too meta for its own good. Valerie embarked on a new TV project (a gritty drama, Seeing Red, about her marriage, plus an accompanying documentary about making the show) while also referencing the two shows from season one.

The Comeback disappeared again. But now, retrospectively lauded by critics and a cult hit among fans, here is the third and final season. Kudrow was 31 when she began playing sweet, gawky Phoebe Buffay. Now she is twice that age and determined that Valerie’s last outing will skewer LA showbiz once and for all.

The opening scenes show Valerie floundering in rehearsals for Chicago as younger cast members mock her for not being able to dance and for using gender-exclusive words like “brethren”.

The cringe factor is high.

In Friends: “Whatever any of us do in the future, we will never experience something like that again” Getty images

Before long Valerie seems to take further swipes at “woke” attitudes. She encourages her husband, Mark (Damian Young), to lighten up after he is fired from his finance job for telling raunchy jokes during lunch break. “You made a joke at work when jokes were illegal. Nobody cares now,” she insists. He in turn lolls in the marital bed hassling his wife for a “hand job” while she’s learning lines for her show. This is decidedly not Phoebe Buffay territory.

Is Kudrow pushing back against MeToo and “woke” comedy?

“No, because the MeToo movement was great,” she insists. “It meant that women could be treated with respect. How could that not be right? But I do believe there came a point where you couldn’t joke about anything. It felt like comedy was dying. But thankfully I think we’ve relaxed a little.”

There are some who credit President Trump with loosening the rules on comedy, albeit inadvertently. Whatever you think of his politics, does he deserve credit for reviving “saying the unsayable”? We are speaking days after he jokingly referenced Pearl Harbor in conversation with the Japanese prime minister.

“No, I don’t,” she says firmly. “I think the thaw was happening before he came along.”

How much of Valerie Cherish is there in Kudrow? She sits bolt upright on the edge of a sofa. “There’s a lot of Valerie that is not me,” she says. “No 1: when Friends took off it was very tempting to think, ‘Well, millions of people around the world think I’m so great so I must be great, right?’ No. You soon learn that believing bullshit can be fatal.”

Winning the award for best television comedy actress at the Screen Actors Guild awards, 2000 Getty Images

In some ways it’s surprising that Kudrow is an actor at all. She grew up in chichi Encino, California, a self-confessed JAP (Jewish American Princess). Her dad, Lee, was an eminent doctor and her mum, Nedra, was a travel agent. Moreover, while studying biology at Vassar, Kudrow thought actors were “phoney”.

“I thought they were all narcissists with relationship problems,” she says. “Listen, I was born aged 35. I couldn’t wait to get old.”

Even her dad thought she was a bit straight and encouraged her to “goof around” occasionally like other students. But her goal was to get her degree, marry and have children. I read an old interview where she says she was looking for a man who was “good merchandise” who would give her “genetically appropriate children”.

“Yeah, that sounds like me,” she says, laughing. “I have friends who used to think I was like a robot, all cogs and wires.”

But she enjoyed comedy, enrolled in the Groundlings and, after small parts on the hit sitcom Cheers and getting fired from another, Frasier, Friends came calling. Kudrow wanted to play Rachel (“I thought I could pull off being shallow and materially minded”), but the producers loved her kookiness.

Yet that early steeliness saved her. She found her man, the French advertising executive Michel Stern, and married him in 1995 before Friends went global. It meant she avoided the intense scrutiny that befell her co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.

For a long time you couldn’t avoid stories about Cox’s facial surgery, and Aniston’s heartbreak over ex-husband Brad Pitt or struggles with fertility. You must’ve felt you dodged a bullet?

With Matthew Perry in 2015 Getty Images

“For sure, and all because I married early and outside the business,” Kudrow says. “No one was interested. There was no story. And very early on I was pretty clear: actors on a big show are well paid and really looked after. But you cannot take that attitude home with you. At home it’s family, life, kids.”

So you take out the bin and peel your own carrots, like everyone else?

“I will peel a carrot if it comes to it,” she says, not wholly convincingly.

Kudrow and her alter ego Valerie Cherish reflect different Hollywood mindsets: one is the cool professional; the other desperate, broken inside. I can’t help but think of Matthew Perry. Was his mindset wrong or was something else troubling him?

“Oh, it was something else,” she says quietly.

Kudrow wrote the foreword to Perry’s powerful 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Terrible Big Thing. In it she said she hadn’t realised just how deep his struggles with addiction went (Perry had issues with alcohol well before he was famous and with opioids, cocaine and ketamine thereafter). That’s why rewatching Friends after his death was so painful.

“Because there was a genius at work,” she says. “And whatever any of us do in the future, we will never experience something like that again.”

Kudrow only gave herself a few years to make it as an actor. If she hadn’t succeeded, she might have taken her psychobiology degree from Vassar and followed her father into medicine.

“I said to myself, ‘You’re young — have fun and try it.’ But always in the knowledge that life gets harder. You take on family and responsibilities.”

In The One with Monica and Chandler’s Wedding, with Jennifer Aniston getty images

But I am fascinated by other ways in which she has grounded herself. I read that Jennifer Aniston once gave her a book called Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians, by Barbara Marciniak. It’s a spiritual guide based on messages Marciniak claims to have received from superintelligent extraterrestrials (the Pleiadians) living on a distant planet.

Was this extraterrestrial advice useful?

“It was useful for providing an intellectual background to Phoebe,” Kudrow says. “To give her a grounding in new age ideas.”

But I read it became part of your own thinking.

“Well, yes, some of it made sense to me. The idea I should maybe relax the rigorous science part of my mind a little. Say yes to things a bit more. Also, that there might be ghosts. I mean, we can’t prove a ghost isn’t a ghost, can we?”

The final season of The Comeback is very sciencey. Kudrow is no longer addressing toxic writers’ rooms or the excesses of reality TV. If anything, these now feel like minor irritants because Valerie has been asked to star in a new sitcom scripted entirely by AI.

The British actor Andrew Scott gives a demonically good turn as the tech bro trying to make TV without the hassle and expense of employing humans (“writers and their f***ing feelings”).

There’s a telling scene in which Valerie meets an old friend who has given up making documentaries to work in a supermarket. She congratulates Valerie on her new sitcom because, she says, that’s what audiences want: “comfort food”, “nothing new”.

It made me think of the millions rewatching Friends and I thought perhaps Kudrow was having a pop.

“A pop? What’s that?”

I thought you were implying AI has killed innovative TV. Everyone is just watching the old stuff.

“No, no. I will never say anything bad about Friends because it’s still incredible work. There are plenty of shows with big-name comedians from that time and they are not funny, but Friends is.”

Kudrow says she even wrote a scene for The Comeback where “Jen” (Jennifer Aniston) invites Valerie round for dinner. When she arrives, all the surviving cast from Friends are waiting for her too. Valerie thinks that it’s a dream A-list evening but it’s not. It’s an angry intervention warning that tech will destroy TV.

With Mira Sorvino in Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion, 1997 Getty images

“I really wanted to make that point,” she says. “But then with stunt casting [big-name cameos] the message sometimes gets overlooked and we had other fish to fry, so we didn’t do it.”

The Comeback was filmed on stage 24 on the Warner Brothers lot, where Friends was made. Kudrow fondly remembers stage 24 back in the Nineties. The Friends cast would knock about with George Clooney and others from the hospital drama ER filming on stage 11 nearby.

“None of us knew what was in store,” she says fondly.

Will we look back on it as an unattainable golden age?

“I really hope not, but that AI future awaits if we don’t protect what’s valuable.”

Valerie Cherish’s fictional AI sitcom is obviously a joke. Yet the day before we meet, an AI-generated Val Kilmer was confirmed to appear in the forthcoming film As Deep as the Grave. Kilmer was cast while alive but died a year ago. Nevertheless, using film and voice archive he will be digitally resurrected.

Would Kudrow accept, say, $200 million for the digital rights to her face if a tech bro wanted to make more episodes of Friends?

“Well, it wouldn’t be my decision,” she says. “All the cast would have to agree. Bright/Kauffman/Crane [the show’s creators and producers] would have to agree too. Some people feel they have enough money and they wouldn’t want that.”

You’ll just have to watch The Comeback to find out if Valerie’s TV show achieves Andrew Scott’s tech bro target: to be “not great, but good enough” and to score “70 per cent completion” (the number of people who bother watching all of it). Meanwhile, I’d read the actress Parker Posey was campaigning for Kudrow to be cast in the next season of The White Lotus (Posey was in season three).

“No, I’m not, and anyway that’s not Parker’s decision, it’s mine,” she says. However, she is making a sequel to the 1997 cult hit Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion with her original co-star, Mira Sorvino.

“The script is very funny,” she says. “And yes, it’ll be the real me, the real Mira Sorvino, with words written by a human.”

Series three of The Comeback is streaming now on HBO Max