Lisa Kudrow recently told The Times of London that she had to endure some “mean stuff” from the writing staff of “Friends,” who were “mostly men,” during her 10-season run on the NBC sitcom. Kudrow, who starred as the free-spirited Phoebe Buffay, said the writers reprimanded the cast for forgetting lines and spent their off-hours fantasizing about her female co-stars.
“There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes,” Kudrow said. “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 fucking read? She’s not even trying. She fucked up my line.’”
She added that, in the writers’ room, “the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer [Aniston] and Courteney [Cox]. It was intense.”
Kudrow described the writers’ treatment of the cast as “brutal,” but she said she didn’t pay them much mind since most of their illicit behavior happened behind closed doors.
“Oh, it could be brutal, but these guys — and it was mostly men in there — were sitting up until 3 a.m. trying to write the show so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter,’ ” she said.
The behavior of the “Friends” writing team was famously exposed by Amaani Lyle back in the early 2000s. Lyle, who worked on the show in 1999 on Season 6, brought a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Television for the writers’ room conduct. In the suit, she claimed that the “Friends” scribes frequently made sexual and racist remarks, and as the writers’ assistant, she was forced to take notes on everything that was said in the room. The case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled against Lyle after deciding the coarse demeanor was a necessary part of the work environment.