Lisa Kudrow has made a surprising admission about her time on one of the most successful television shows ever made, saying that during Friends, nobody at her agency had any real interest in her or expectations for her career.
“Nobody cared about me,” the 62-year-old told The Independent in an interview published on Saturday, 4 April.
“There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend.'”
She added that “there was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have.”
The attitude she encountered, she recalled, was essentially: “Boy, is she lucky she got on that show.”
It’s a striking thing to hear from someone who won an Emmy for the role in 1998 and spent a decade playing Phoebe Buffay alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry on a show that ran from 1994 to 2004.
But the lack of industry attention had an upside.
Free from the pressure of being packaged and pushed in a particular direction, Kudrow was able to pursue a genuinely varied slate of work during the Friends years, including 1996’s Mother, 1997’s Clockwatchers and 1999’s Analyze This alongside Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal.
It was the latter film that finally turned heads.
“The agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things,” she said.
