There were 236 episodes of Friends, and Lisa Kudrow was in them all. She played Phoebe Buffay, of course, who was eccentric, streetwise and wrote the song Smelly Cat. The actress has also been in cult films and smart television — Phoebe was just one blossom on a career of many branches — but you don’t take part in Friends and expect to be remembered for something else. The sitcom finished 16 years ago, but was still the most-streamed show in the UK last year. So, as she pops up on Zoom from her lockdown in the desert outside Los Angeles, I obviously think of Friends and, less obviously, whether she regrets being part of it.
“Oh God, no!” she says shocked, with the full seesaw volume and physical bluster you’d expect. “I don’t see a reality where Friends was anything but good.” She bursts out laughing, as I wonder aloud whether, having been in something that era-defining, she may have found herself typecast and unable to have as varied a working life as she could have done.
“Friends has been nothing but good,” she repeats, arguing that, in films such as the dark comedy The Opposite of Sex, which she made during the heyday of Friends, she played something other than her small-screen ditz anyway. “It’s very hard to stake your claim in this business,” she continues. “So anything that puts you in a spotlight where people pay attention is an opportunity. When we were done with Friends I thought, ‘I’ll just do independent films. That will be fulfilling — that’s what I’ll do!’ But then independent films went away …”
She trails off. The rise of superhero franchises has long been seen as a key reason why independent cinema collapsed, leading to a dearth in character drama on the big screen. Thus, like many, Kudrow found herself back on television, playing the lead in the reality star satire The Comeback, which she also created, and taking support slots in prestige projects ranging from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to Channel 4’s recent Feel Good. This month she will be in Steve Carell’s big Netflix comedy Space Force, as Maggie, wife of General Naird, the man in charge of America’s latest galactic exploits.
Kudrow’s few scenes are subtle and sweet. She was always a good actress, playing a scatterbrain for a decade despite having a degree in evolutionary biology. In Space Force, as the calm in a cockfight of male egos, she seems to be above all the confusion around her — which Phoebe probably was too.
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Speaking of confusion, our Zoom call starts as most do, with one unable to see the other and both pressing buttons. Once in focus, with her long blonde hair and big warm smile, she doesn’t seem to have changed at all. Or, maybe, when you spend so much time watching an actor on screen, it becomes hard to shift that image.
“I have this room set up for me,” she begins, as she spins around, looking for a socket. “But my husband’s rearranged it. Because he’s helpful.” She is isolating with said husband, Michel, and their son, Julian, who is 22 and can’t wait to get away. “We have fortunate circumstances here, though,” she says. “I don’t have complaints. [Before the pandemic] I would spend weekends never leaving my house anyway, which to me was heaven.”
The appeal of Space Force, launching into the middle of all this uncertainty, is that it is a broad comedy that mocks President Trump and his obsession with an army in space. It is very silly and we need silly. Think Team America: World Police, but a force on duty in case there are moon-grabbing Chinese. That’s the level not just of the jingoistic absurdity satirised, but also of the billions of dollars wasted.
Kudrow signed up because of the script. “First thing I look for is, ‘Is it well written?’” she says. “You know, especially after being on Friends. Sorry, it’s not for the money! I need to know why I’m doing something.”
The show blends realism and surrealism, and it is that style of work that makes her tick — it’s what an actress who earned $1m an episode in the later years of Friends and admits to not enjoying travelling needs to make her head out to a set. She speaks glowingly of This Is Spinal Tap — “Insanity, but grounded” — and loves the awkward pauses in both versions of The Office.
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As such, The Comeback — which premiered in 2005, a year after Friends ended — was her to the letter. It was, in parts, absurd, as Kudrow’s role as the former sitcom star Valerie clearly played into her own post-Friends life. But there was more to it than just wink-wink comedy. Desperate for fame, Valerie humiliates herself on a reality show, and this always seemed like something Kudrow was genuinely concerned about, as somebody who had to deal with a level of fame only describable as intense.
“There were six of us who were put in the spotlight together, right? Yet it was still challenging, even though we had each other to bounce off. I know fame can be hard, even if that’s what people seek out, and, yes, at the time I made The Comeback, I was concerned. I was watching reality shows, wondering what they were going to do when the show is over. They don’t have anything else to keep them in the spotlight, and they’ve had the most humiliating things broadcast nationwide. I was worried about people not being able to mentally survive that — and, sure enough, there were casualties.”
No sitcom since Friends, though, has matched the impact it had, as scripted shows have been replaced in the conversation by reality ones such as Love Island. On such projects, I say, fame comes first, talent is nowhere to be seen. But they have become the norm to such an extent that it is hard to see a way back for mainstream television.
“Right. Because they’re cheap to do,” she says bluntly. “And nobody looks away from a train wreck. But they all feel more and more scripted. I worked with someone who produced one of those shows, and she said the stars say, ‘I don’t like how you edited my character.’ What do they mean? It’s their first name, address and children, what character? They’re a terrible version of themselves for the sake of being interesting.”
Kudrow is 56. Born, brought up and still living in California, from a line of eastern European and German immigrants, she seems the smartest and, frankly, most normal former Friends star. Perhaps that is because she never had to deal with the celebrity Jennifer Aniston did; and when it comes to stop-the-traffic fame, she is probably the fifth most hassled, above Matthew Perry, below David Schwimmer.
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Recently, though, Friends has met with the cancel-culture criticism du jour, largely from people who were not born when it began and think the show is, deep breath: transphobic, sexist, fat-shaming, racist, homophobic. Pick apart such criticisms as much as you have time for, but one thing this angry and self-appointed focus group are right about is that Friends would not be made now as it was then.
“Oh, it’d be completely different,” Kudrow agrees. What would change? “Well, it would not be an all-white cast, for sure. I’m not sure what else, but, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong. Also, this show thought it was very progressive. There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together? We had surrogacy too. It was, at the time, progressive.”
And, by and large, a comedy. “Yes, it’s a fun comedy,” she says. “But it’s also about people connecting, and part of what appeals about it now is that young people have this unconscious nostalgia for personal connection. And not just right now during the pandemic, but before that.”
At the end of the summer, if allowed to be in the same room together, the six leads from Friends will gather on the original Burbank soundstage for a one-off reunion.
“No audience has seen us together since the show was over,” she says, beaming. “We will reminisce, talk about what was going on behind the scenes. It’s not us playing our characters. It’s not an episode. It’s not scripted. It’s six of us coming together for the first time in I don’t know how long. I am really looking forward to it, because I think that I remember things, but then I talk to Matt [LeBlanc] or Jennifer, and they remember everything. It’s really fun.”
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Back to reality, I ask about the role of entertainment during the coronavirus pandemic. Friends was still on at the time of 9/11 and, back then, Kudrow said she looked to television as a means of thinking about anything but that atrocity. It was a distraction and, she thinks, can be that again. With cinemas and theatres closed, television has been one of the few art forms actually available to people.
“I’m watching a lot of old sitcoms, anything that’s in a world that makes me laugh where there’s no coronavirus,” she says. “But after 9/11, when I’d watch a show that took place in New York, I’d think, ‘I wonder if they knew anyone in the towers?’ So, even now, I watch something, see people take a piece of food from someone else’s plate and put it in their mouth and think, ‘God! You can’t do that.’ Or they hug, and I go, ‘Right, pre-coronavirus.’” She frowns, shakes her head. “But entertainment has always been valuable because people need it. And at times like this? They really need it. They need escape. It’s really important.”
How would Phoebe cope under lockdown? “I don’t know,” she says, but she’s thinking, not blocking. Unlike some, she is delighted by what made her world-famous. This is not Harrison Ford and Han Solo. She loves Phoebe and laughs about how, when her son — the bump in series 4 — was in kindergarten, girls there would say how much they loved Friends, and Kudrow would think they were too young to watch it. Now, she says, her son has “watched some, but not a lot”.
When Friends ended, Phoebe had the good fortune to marry Mike, played by Paul Rudd. What would they be doing during all this? “I feel like if they’d had kids,” she says, “she would be militaristic about creating art. So their place would be overrun with huge, outlandish projects.”
That can be Episode 237, then: The One With Nobody Leaving the House. And I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want to watch it.
