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Topics: Friends, Lisa Kudrow, Celebrity, Film and TV
Phoebe Tonks
Topics: Friends, Lisa Kudrow, Celebrity, Film and TV
During it’s original ten series run, Friends became one of the 90s and 00s most beloved sitcoms, regularly bringing light hearted humour and cozy comfort to millions of fans around the world.
Yet behind the scenes of this tongue-in-cheek series, there remained a darker presence - one that could make life on set extremely uncomfortable for some of it’s lead stars.
Now, 22 years on since the show concluded, Lisa Kudrow - who played the eccentric Phoebe Buffay in the show - has candidly lifted the lid on her experience on set, including the ‘mean’ behaviour which threatened to steal the joy from the whole series.
But before you go presuming that it was her cast-mates that were the problem, it turns out it was actually members of the crew and writers who were the ones making life far more painful than it needed to be.
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"There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes," Kudrow explained in an interview with The Times, published on April 23.
"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 b**ch f**king read? She's not even trying. She f**ked up my line'."
Kudrow also went on to claim that she and her cast-mates, especially Jennifer Anniston and Courtney Cox, regularly bore the brunt of sexual comments behind closed doors.
"Back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense,” she remarked.
Yet while the comments could be considered in poor taste and made it a ‘brutal’ work environment, Kudrow explained why she let it carry on unchecked.
She told The Times that the dynamic between the Friends cast and its writers '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.
Friends ran for 10 seasons on NBC, from 1994 to 2004, earning Kudrow and Aniston both Emmy Awards, along with legions of fans who to this day, still can’t get enough of the show, as it regularly broadcasts re-runs on multiple global networks.
As well as generating a solid fanbase, it also forged a friendship for life among the core cast, with Kudrow previously admitting that the ‘six-way relationship took some work’, but had remained solid well after the show had finished.
Instead, it was her management that made her feel neglected, as she revealed earlier this month: "Nobody cared about me... There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as 'the sixth Friend,'" she said.
"There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have."
The LADbible Group has reached out to Warner Bros. and Kudrow's reps for comment.