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Friends star Lisa Kudrow has shared the darker side of her time on the hit sitcom, revealing that the female cast faced “intense” scrutiny from its mostly male writers’ room.
Kudrow, 62, is best known for starring as free spirit Phoebe Buffet in all 10 seasons of the comedy, which has become one of the highest-grossing TV shows of all time since it first aired in 1994.
Over 20 years on from Friends’ finale, Kudrow admitted in a new interview that there was “mean stuff going on behind the scenes” in the writers’ room, which was mostly men and made up of 12 to 15 staff members.
David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc on ‘Friends’ (NBC)
“Don’t forget 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 told The Times on Thursday (23 April).
“And we know that back in the room, the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense.”
She added that while it “could be brutal”, the writers were up all night writing on the sitcom. “These guys – and it was mostly men in there – were sitting up until 3am trying to write the show, so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter.’”
During the show’s run, writer’s assistant Amaani Lyle alleged in a lawsuit that she had experienced racial discrimination and sexual harassment while working in the Friends writers’ room. She alleged that she had heard the writers talk 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. The harassment lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2006.
Kudrow now stars in ‘The Comeback’ (Getty)
Kudrow – who currently stars in the third season of The Comeback on HBO Max – told The Independent earlier in April that her professional life didn’t change much despite Friends becoming a runaway success by season two.
“Nobody cared about me,” she said. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend’.”
After being reminded that she was the first of the cast to win an Emmy, receiving it for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 1998, she added: “Yeah, 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.’”
After Friends, Kudrow went on to star in Web Therapy, sitcom Space Force and appeared in Easy A, Booksmart and Long Shot.