The actress won an Emmy Award for her role as Phoebe Buffay in the hit sitcom in 1998
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NEED TO KNOW
- Lisa Kudrow said “nobody cared about me” when she played Phoebe Buffay on Friends in a recent interview
- She said that “there was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have”
- Kudrow won an Emmy Award for her role in 1998
Lisa Kudrow flew under the radar on Friends.
The actress — who recently premiered the third and final season of The Comeback — said “nobody cared about me” when she played Phoebe Buffay on Friends in an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Independent published on Saturday, April 4.
“Nobody cared about me,” Kudrow, 62, recalled. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend.’ ”
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She went on to say that “there was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have.”
“There was just, like, ‘Boy, is she lucky she got on that show,’ " Kudrow explained.
However, the freedom allowed Kudrow to take on a variety of different roles, including 1996’s Mother, 1997’s Clockwatchers and 1999’s Analyze This. The latter movie, which also starred Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal, marked a moment in her career when “the agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things.”
Friends aired for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 and followed six friends living in New York City. The show also starred Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry.
Kudrow won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Phoebe in 1998.
In a March interview for Interview Magazine, Kudrow said her character from the hit sitcom “wasn’t stupid” despite public reception. “At the time, it was like, 'She’s such a ditz. How is it that you only play ditzes?' And I thought, 'Is she a ditz?' To me, she wasn’t,” she said of her character.
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In 2024, Kudrow told Today.com that her early success on Friends opened the door for her later works.
"Because I was on Friends, I got to create my own shows that didn't have to be as big as Friends, so I could do something like The Comeback or Web Therapy, and that was really fulfilling,” she said.
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