Lisa Kudrow is looking back at ‘Friends’ with a lot less nostalgia than some fans might expect. The actress, who played Phoebe Buffay across all 10 seasons of the NBC hit, says that behind the show’s massive success, she often felt like the one nobody was really betting on.
Kudrow, now 62, made that painfully clear while discussing her career after ‘Friends’ and the way parts of the industry saw her at the time. And honestly, it is a rough thing to hear about one of the most recognizable sitcom casts in TV history.
Lisa Kudrow Says She Was Treated Like ‘The Sixth Friend’
In a recent interview, Kudrow said she felt largely overlooked during her ‘Friends’ years, despite becoming one of the show’s most beloved characters. “Nobody cared about me,” she said, adding that some people at her own talent agency referred to her as “the sixth Friend.”
‘Friends’, which ran from 1994 to 2004, built its entire identity around six equal stars navigating life in New York. But off-screen, Kudrow says the industry did not exactly see her that way.
She said there was “no vision” for her career and very little expectation about what she might do next. The attitude, in her view, was more like: she was lucky to have made it onto the show at all.
For an actress who won an Emmy in 1998 for playing Phoebe, that is a pretty brutal read on how little confidence some people had in her.
How ‘Friends’ Opened Doors Even When Hollywood Looked Elsewhere
Still, Kudrow said that lack of expectation came with one upside. It gave her room to take on weirder, more varied projects instead of being pushed into one narrow lane too early.
During and after ‘Friends’, she appeared in films like ‘Mother’, ‘Clockwatchers’, and ‘Analyze This’, the 1999 comedy with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. She said ‘Analyze This’ became a turning point, with agents and executives suddenly trying to steer her toward romantic comedies.
Kudrow has also spent years pushing back against the way Phoebe was perceived. In a March conversation, she said the character “wasn’t stupid,” even if a lot of people seemed eager to reduce her to a ditzy sitcom type.
That matters because Kudrow’s post-‘Friends’ career has been built on proving she could do much more than the industry first imagined. In 2024, she said the success of the sitcom gave her enough leverage to create projects that were smaller, stranger, and more personally satisfying, including ‘The Comeback’ and ‘Web Therapy’.
That may be the most interesting part of her reflection now. Lisa Kudrow was underestimated during one of the biggest shows in TV history, and she still managed to turn that into a career with far more range than many people saw coming.
