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Lisa Kudrow suggested she was treated as if she were an afterthought compared to the rest of her Friends costars in a new interview.
While speaking with the Independent, she said that her costars — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, the late Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer — eclipsed her in popularity while the series was still on television, even among the talent agency she was paying to find her choice roles.
‘Nobody cared about me,’ Kudrow claimed. ‘There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as “the sixth Friend.”‘
As Friends became a megahit starting with its second season, several of her costars were able to leverage that success to secure choice film roles, but Kudrow thought the same kinds of deals eluded her.
‘There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have,’ she said. ‘There was just, like, “Boy, is she lucky she got on that show.”‘
Despite feeling unappreciated earlier in her career, Kudrow has since found enduring success beyond Friends, including on her twice-revived HBO series The Comeback.
Kudrow, who co-created the series, was joined for the interview by her fellow co-creator, Michael Patrick King.
He was astonished to hear that she wasn’t drowning in offers amid the success of Friends, and he pointed out that she was also the first member of the cast to win an Emmy (for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1998).
According to Kudrow, it was only when she starred as the wife of a psychiatrist treating a mob boss in the 1999 comedy Analyze This — which costarred Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal — that she began to get more compelling offers.
‘That’s when the agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things,’ she said, even though she was certain that the strategy wouldn’t work because she didn’t consider herself ‘adorable’ enough.
Before moving up into more prestigious film roles, Kudrow was mostly offered low-budget independent films, like 1997’s Clockwatchers, or small supporting roles, as in Albert Brooks’s 1996 comedy Mother.
Despite the slim pickings, she remembered being honored to work with her Clockwatchers costars, Parker Posey and Toni Collette, as well as her Mother costar and director, Brooks.
Kudrow ventured a theory that she had been harmed by reports that she had taken the lead role in getting her costars to join together and collectively bargain when it came time to renegotiate their contracts ahead of season three.
The main cast managed to ink a deal with Warner Bros — which had wanted to only negotiate with each actor individually in hopes of paying some of them less — that led them to make each equal, increasing salaries for each subsequent season, with a major jump from $125,000 per episode to $750,000 per episode in seasons seven and eight.
By seasons nine and ten, each actor was making an astounding $1 million per episode, a feat that has rarely been equaled.
But according to Kudrow, her talent agency was upset about rumors that she had taken the lead on the successful negotiating strategy, even though she denied being responsible.
‘I absolutely was not the ringleader,’ Kudrow said. ‘And that was reported, and it wasn’t true. My team were very angry about that. It was leaked sort of as a warning to other clients like, “Don’t do something like that.”‘
She hoped that people would think she was ‘really smart’ because of the successful negotiations, ‘But my team were like, “No, this is not good! We’re furious that they’re saying this about you.”‘
Ironically, her agents stood to make significant financial gains from her windfall, as they are traditionally paid around ten percent of what their clients earn.
In another recent conversation with Lily Tomlin for Interview Magazine, Kudrow clarified that Phoebe wasn’t particularly like her, despite how she became so identified with the role.
‘At first, Phoebe was very, very far from me,’ she said. ‘It took a lot of work to justify the things she would say and do. Not in an irritating way — it was fun.’
Over time, though, the part began to shift as she became more comfortable with it.
‘Over the course of 10 years, a little bit of her came into me,’ Kudrow continued. ‘I lightened up a little more and read some books on spirituality and things, just to try to understand her.’
Kudrow also pushed back on the idea that she ‘only play[s] ditzes,’ and admitted that she doesn’t even consider Phoebe a ditz anymore.
‘In 1994, it was like, “I love her. She’s such a ditz.” And it’s like, yeah, OK, that was what a ditz was to us. Someone who wasn’t toeing the line,’ she said.
Kudrow is currently promoting the third and final season of her HBO series The Comeback.
She stars on the mockumentary as the B-list actress Valerie Cherish, who struggles to revive her career after falling out of favor in the industry.
The first season aired in 2005, just a year after Friends ended, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade later, in 2014, that a second season was produced.
Now, the third and final season returns after an even longer interval to find Valerie again struggling to revive her career.