Lisa Kudrow has spoken more about one of her biggest bug-bears from back during her time making Friends.
Earlier this month, the Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion star was forced to set the record straight after her co-star Jennifer Aniston claimed that Lisa “hated” it when the studio audience laughed during a taping.
“It irritated me if they would laugh for too long,” she clarified during an interview with Entertainment Tonight, and was once again asked about it during an interview with the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.
“[I was irritated] because they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny,” she explained. “That’s why. It wasn’t an honest response, and it irritated me.
“It’s like, ‘now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show’. Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘come on’. Really angry.”
Lisa continued: “A TV show is not for the studio audience. It’s made for the TV viewers at home. That’s who we’re in service to.
“If it were a stage play – yeah, laugh as long as you want! I’ll figure out things to keep my character busy, waiting to continue with it, that’s fine. But then, it’s being filmed, and now I’m just sort of like standing there.”
The Emmy winner added that she’d find herself doing “things that you hate” to fill in the space while the audience were laughing, “nodding, like ‘that’s right! I said that!’”.
Lisa also recalled the show’s warm-up act would warn the audience against doing “anything like that”, noting that it took the cast around “six to eight hours” to shoot a half-hour episode.
Meanwhile, Lisa revealed last month that she’s found herself able to watch the award-winning sitcom comfortably for the first time following the death of her former colleague and friend Matthew Perry.
“I used to not be able to watch it at all. I’d see it on, and be mildly interested. And then I’d see me and say, ‘that’s enough of that, I can’t bear it’,” she told Conan.
“After Matthew died, I could start watching the show again, because it wasn’t about me. It had to do with him, for some reason. And so, I have started watching Friends. There are marathons on and I have spent, at times since he died, all day long watching the show. And Everyone is phenomenally hilarious to me.”
Days after Matthew’s death in October 2023, the five core members of the Friends cast issued a shared statement, saying they were all “utterly devastated” by the loss.
Each of them later posted more personal individual tributes on social media, with Lisa sharing her memories of Matthew making her laugh so hard “that my muscles ached, and tears poured down my face EVERY DAY”.
Since then, Lisa also recalled one of Friends’ most iconic sequences was actually all Matthew’s idea.