Lisa Kudrow exposes “mean” and “brutal” behavior by male screenwriters on “Friends.”
“There were definitely some despicable things going on behind the scenes,” Kudlow said in an interview with the London Times published last Thursday.
“Remember we were recording in front of a live audience of 400 people. If you mess up these writers’ lines or don’t get the perfect response, they might say, ‘Can’t this woman read? She’s not even trying. She got my lines wrong.'”
Kudrow claimed that in a writers’ room filled with 12 to 15 mostly male staff members, “the men were discussing their sexual fantasies late into the night” about co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.
“It was intense,” she added.
The Emmy winner reiterated that the dynamic between the NBC comedy’s writers and stars “can be brutal.”
“But they, and they were mostly men, were sitting until 3 a.m. writing the show, and my attitude was, ‘Just say what you like about me behind my back, and we’ll be fine,'” Kudrow recalled.
Page Six has reached out to representatives for Aniston, Cox, and co-creators Marta Kaufman and David Crane.
Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay on Friends from 1994 to 2004, co-starring Aniston, Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and the late Matthew Perry.
The behavior of the writing staff on “Friends” has previously come into question when former writing assistant Amaani Lyle filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Television in 2004, accusing the writers of sexual and racial harassment.
The case eventually reached the California Supreme Court, which ruled against Lyle and said the rough and vulgar behavior was a necessary part of the work environment, Variety reported.
Elsewhere in the interview with the Times, Kudrow, who began rewatching “Friends” after Perry’s death in October 2023, called his late co-star a “genius.”
“No matter what we do in the future, we will never experience something like that again,” she said.
The “Comeback” actress also declared, “I’ll never say anything bad about ‘Friends’ because it’s still great.”
Kudrow added, “There are a lot of shows with big comedians of the time that aren’t funny, but ‘Friends’ is funny.”
