Phoebe Buffay might have been the quirkiest Friend, but Lisa Kudrow says she wasn’t exactly a priority.
The actress said “nobody cared about me” despite her role on “Friends,” telling The Independent in an interview published Saturday, April 4, that she didn’t experience a boost from the show professionally. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend.'”
Kudrow – while discussing the third and final season of HBO’s “The Comeback,” airing 12 years after the second and 21 years after the first – said even with being the first cast member to win an Emmy for the series in 1998, “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.'”
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The dismissal from agents allowed her to have more freedom in the projects she went for outside of the behemoth of a sitcom, including the 1996 comedy-drama “Mother,” the 1997 comedy “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” and the 1997 indie comedy-drama “Clockwatchers” with Parker Posey and Toni Collette. The 1999 comedy “Analyze This,” starring Robert De Niro, is what finally started to turn more industry heads.Need a news break?
“That’s when the agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things,” she told the outlet, her face screwing up in mock horror. “I knew that wasn’t gonna work. I’m just not adorable!”
Kudrow has become one of the more consistently working Friends since the show’s end in 2004, including in the Showtime series “Web Therapy,” “Easy A” and “Scandal.”
“The Comeback,” one of her most critically acclaimed roles outside of “Friends,” sees her play sitcom actress Valerie Cherish in the experimental satirical comedy cocreated with “Sex in the City” executive producer Michael Patrick King. And Deadline reports that a sequel to “Romy and Michele,” with costars Mira Sorvino and Alan Cumming, is underway.
Kudrow has expressed how playing Phoebe was “a lot of work,” telling Parker Posey in a Variety sit-down in 2025 that the character is so much different from her. “It became fun. It was fun the whole time because the cast had fun. Phoebe was so far from who I was as a human being, it was work,” she said.
