Lisa Kudrow said this week her offscreen friendship with her onscreen Friends sometimes took some work, but the result will always be worth it.
“It was great, we really did get along,” Kudrow told Dax Shepherd on his Armchair Expert podcast. From 1994 to 2004 Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay on NBC’s Friends, which also starred Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer and the late Matthew Perry as a group of six friends in New York City.
“That six-way relationship took some work and we did it,” Kudrow continued, saying the group “worked hard at being friends.”
What was the work that made it work? “Really talking things through,” Kudrow continued. “If someone said something or did something, it didn’t get too big, because it was, ‘Can I talk to you?’”
The actress went on to say that the communication style was new to her at the time, and she learned a lot from her co-stars. “I had to learn to be, ‘Can I talk to you about something?’ because I never knew that was allowed,” Kudrow said. “But I saw it modeled really well by Courteney and Jennifer and Matt. Respectful communication.”
Friends celebrated its 30th anniversary in September, and many stars and behind-the-scenes crew used the milestone to honor Perry, who died less than a year earlier on Oct. 28, 2023, from the acute effects of Ketamine. Kudrow said she began re-watching the show for the first time after Perry’s death.
“He just was so funny,” she said. “It was just this whole appreciation. I was like, ‘I’ve got to watch all of them.’”
Creator Marta Kauffman said in an interview in September that mourning Perry made the 30th anniversary “a little fraught,” but added: “Two things come to mind [about how to celebrate him]: one of them is to donate to drug treatment centers — let’s fight the disease. And the second way is to watch Friends and remember him not as a man who died like that but as a man who was hilariously funny and brought joy to everybody.”