Lisa Kudrow says her Friends character Phoebe ‘was so far from who I am’

By Hannah Roberts, PA Entertainment Reporter

US actress Lisa Kudrow has said it was “a lot of work” playing her Friends character Phoebe Buffay as she “was so far from who I was as a human being”.

The 61-year-old from Los Angeles played one of six friends featured in the hit US sitcom which also starred Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Matt Le Blanc and the late Matthew Perry.

Speaking to US actress Parker Posey for Variety’s Actors On Actors series, she said: “It (the series) was fun the whole time, because we had fun, the cast had fun.

“It was like a collaboration with the writers, because they were so great and nice and good.

“But me being Phoebe was so far from who I was as a human being that it was work.

“I needed to justify everything she was saying in my head so that it felt like she meant it and it was real to her. It was a lot of work.

“And I remember like season two or three, and I was just doing it, and went, ‘Oh my god, I’m not doing the work. I don’t know if this is going as well. I’m not doing the work’.

“I was really fretting over it. And (Matt) LeBlanc went, ‘What’s the matter with you?’. I said, ‘I’m not doing the work that I did. I used to like really work, and he said, ‘You’re her. You don’t have to do it anymore’.”

Alongside her role in Friends, Kudrow is known for starring in a number of TV series as well as comedy films Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and The Opposite Of Sex.

In 2023 she thanked her late co-star Perry for “the best 10 years a person gets to have” while filming Friends in a tribute following his death at the age of 54.

During their conversation, Posey, who has starred in films including Dazed And Confused and Superman Returns, spoke about one of her more recent roles playing a southern woman called Victoria Ratliff in season three of Mike White’s dark comedy, The White Lotus.

She said: “It was such a gift to have this middle-aged woman at this time in my life, in my career, to be the southern woman.

“I was reading Tennessee Williams in junior high and high school and southern writers and all of this. So I was like, I just ate it up.”