Lisa Kudrow Revealed The Friends Set Wasn’t That Friendly

Lisa Kudrow has opened up about the cruelty she and other women experienced behind-the-scenes while filming Friends.

In an interview with The Times, Kudrow, 62, who rose to fame as the sitcom’s carefree, kooky character Phoebe, revealed that the female cast — Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, and Kudrow — often faced “intense” scrutiny from the writers’ room and that there was “mean stuff going on behind the scenes.”

Over the show's 10-season run, Kudrow recalled that the writers, who were predominantly men, would often speak cruelly about the female cast during taping.

“We were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response, they could be like, ‘Can’t the bitch f***ing read? She’s not even trying. She f***ed up my line,’” she said.

Kudrow also said it didn’t end there. “And we know that back in the room, the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney,” she added. “It was intense.”

This isn’t the first time Friends has faced allegations of workplace malpractice and discrimination behind the scenes. Former writer Patty Lin detailed the “imposter syndrome” she developed while writing on Friends in her 2023 memoir. During the show’s run, writer’s assistant Amaani Lyle also alleged in a historic lawsuit that she faced racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the Friends writers’ room.

In the lawsuit, Lyle said she remembered writers talking about “what they would like to do sexually to different female cast members on the show” and made “demeaning comments” about another actress in the cast, an identical account to Kudrow’s memory.

But Kudrow said that her professional life didn’t change much amidst Friends’ success, even though she was the first cast member to win an Emmy in 1998, for Outstanding Supporting Actress.

“Nobody cared about me,” she said. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend.’”

Even though the show found major success, soon becoming one of the highest-grossing television shows of all time, Kudrow remembered that there was still a lack of interest in her, whether in her on-screen performance or her career. “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.’”

Since the Friends finale, Kudrow has appeared in shows like Space Force, BoJack Horseman, and Scandal.