Still There For You, Bestie
Even Lisa Kudrow Felt Overlooked During Friends
“There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend,’” Kudrow revealed in a new interview.
In the two decades since Friends took its final bow, Lisa Kudrow has more than proven her creative chops in an eclectic medley of projects — earning Emmy nods for shows such as Who Do You Think You Are?, Web Therapy, and The Comeback, the cult-classic comedy whose third (and final) season is airing now. But in the early days of playing Phoebe Buffay, Kudrow didn’t think Hollywood had high hopes for her career.
In a new interview with The Independent, Kudrow reflected on Friends fame — noting that even as the show’s exposure rose, she didn’t feel received by the industry as a performer in her own right. “Nobody cared about me,” she said in the interview, published on April 4. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend.’”
In the same interview, Michael Patrick King — who co-created The Comeback with Kudrow, who also stars — pointed out that she was actually the first of the Friends bunch to win an Emmy.
“Yeah,” Kudrow noted. “But 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.’”
Of course, if you’re on a perpetual Friends rewatch (personally, I clock in every day), you know that Kudrow was an essential piece of the show’s uniquely feel-good spirit. Phoebe’s unconventional upbringing and lack of long-running ties with the group might have made her the outsider, but her quirks brought hilarious charm — from comforting Rachel with the nickname “Pheebs” (“I thought that’s just what we call each other”) to bringing much-needed perspective to the group’s on-and-off drama. See: telling Rachel, with some tough love, that her planning to skip Ross’ wedding over their tricky history was “high-school crap.”
Even if Kudrow didn’t feel love from the industry, she certainly found a family among her castmates. “We really did get along,” Kudrow told Armchair Expert in 2024, explaining that she worked hard to prioritize respectful communication with her on-and-off-screen pals (Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and the late Matthew Perry).
And if you ever feel like getting emotional, watch the behind-the-scenes featurette of the rest of the Friends cast filming in London while Kudrow stayed at home because she was pregnant IRL. “We feel like we have a limb missing,” Aniston says in the sweet throwback footage.
