Body image issues, love from David Bowie and the fear of a comeback: Lisa Kudrow is long past being just Phoebe Buffay
She was one of the biggest stars of the world's most successful sitcom, but for years she struggled to appreciate herself and her work — and to find success that stood on its own. More than 20 years after "Friends", with a star on the Walk of Fame, another Emmy nomination and the closing of the circle of "The Comeback", it seems that it is finally Lisa Kudrow's turn to gain renewed appreciation.
If you know exactly where the left phalange is or hum songs from time to time about a smelly cat and pubic hair — it is likely that Lisa Kudrow has not really left your life. More than 20 years after "Friends" went off the screen, Phoebe Buffay still lives in pop culture, but the woman who played her did not always feel she deserved the same love. Now, precisely in 2026, it seems that it is finally her turn to stand proudly in the center of the stage.
After Jennifer Aniston received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012 and Courteney Cox joined her in 2023, 63-year-old Kudrow becomes the third member of the "Friends" cast to receive this honor. She was chosen as part of the 2027 class, alongside some of the hottest names in the industry such as Pedro Pascal, Adam Scott, Keke Palmer, Idris Elba, Kate Hudson, Linkin Park, Sia and David Guetta. And it does not end there. This year Kudrow also returned to the awards season with an Emmy nomination for the third and final season of "The Comeback" — her third nomination for the same series, after 2006 and 2015. Thereby she set a record with a 20-year gap between the first and third nomination for the same comedic role, and at the same time was also nominated in the script category, which she wrote with her longtime partner Michael Patrick King. But although today there is no doubt that Kudrow is a sparkling star, for years she actually felt she was being left behind. "I didn't feel I was funny," she admitted in a conversation two months ago with Jennifer Aniston as part of Variety's Actors on Actors format. She said she was critical of herself, struggled to accept her acting style and even her voice. Aniston, for her part, replied that she remembers that insecurity well — although, from her perspective, it was never justified.
"I thought actors were egocentric people"
Lisa Kudrow was not supposed to be an actress at all. She grew up in Los Angeles in a Jewish family, the daughter of a doctor father who specialized in headache research and a travel agent mother. Although her father was an atheist and her family did not belong to a synagogue, Kudrow chose to celebrate a bat mitzvah. "We had a friend who was a rabbi, and he agreed to teach me — not face to face, but through tapes that I would listen to, and I read the text phonetically," she told an interview with The Saturday Evening Post in 2014. "After that my son also wanted a bar mitzvah, but it required a lot of work, and we were not members of a synagogue. And then one day he was at the mall, and two Chabad Hasidim approached him and asked: 'Are you Jewish? Have you already had a bar mitzvah?'. He answered that he was half-Jewish, and they asked: 'Is your mother Jewish?'. When he answered that she was, they told him: 'Great, come here, we'll do you a bar mitzvah in 30 seconds'. They performed the ceremony with him, took a picture, and that's it. He was there all alone — and that's how his bar mitzvah was".
But Kudrow's bat mitzvah was not significant only because of her connection to Judaism. In retrospect, that is also where the first seeds of her acting career were sown. On that same day she also received from her brother's best friend, actor Jon Lovitz, a biography of actress Uta Hagen, on which he wrote her a dedication: "To my theater colleague". Years later, Lovitz did not settle for the gift: he also convinced her to audition for The Groundlings improv troupe, a legendary comedian incubator from which emerged, among others, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph. However, at first Kudrow actually started following in her father's footsteps. After finishing a degree in biology at the prestigious Vassar College, she worked as a researcher in his lab, on the way to a scientific career that seemed much safer than Hollywood. Eventually, this chapter in her life became a joke in the first season of "Friends", when Phoebe tries to convince Ross that perhaps evolution did not happen at all. "It's funny, because I have a degree in evolutionary biology," she told Jennifer Aniston, "that's probably one of the reasons they chose to write it".
To our delight, Kudrow was convinced to give the acting world a chance, and was accepted to The Groundlings in 1989. At the beginning of the road she gave herself only a few years to try to fulfill the acting dream, thinking that if it did not succeed she would return to the psychobiology degree and continue her father's path in medicine. "I thought actors were egocentric people with poor judgment," she admitted in 2014. "Someone who wants to be an actor... that doesn't seem like a very mature thing to me". According to her, she almost gave up on the idea already in her second improv class. "I arrived late, I felt so ridiculous during the exercises that I wasn't sure I would continue. I sat on the side and watched people make fools of themselves". And then one of her classmates, a young comedian named Conan O'Brien, went up for an exercise. "He threw an imaginary space ball, but it looked like he was really throwing a ball. It didn't look silly, and he didn't exaggerate. He was just completely committed to what he was doing. At that moment I realized that as long as you are committed to the end, you are protected from embarrassment". Years later, when O'Brien was debating his future, Kudrow said she encouraged him to apply to host NBC's late-night show after David Letterman's departure. "I told him that you can't replace Letterman, so it's better that it be someone that no one knows yet". Her big break also did not come easily. In 1993 she was already cast to play Roz in the new sitcom "Frasier", but was fired even before the first episode aired. A few months later she played Ursula in "Mad About You", and when they were looking for an actress to play her twin sister in a new sitcom called "Friends", Kudrow got a second chance. The role of Phoebe Buffay made her one of the most beloved characters in television history, and in 1998 also earned her an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
"Today I am able to watch 'Friends' without punishing myself"
It took exactly a moment for the globe to fall in love with Phoebe Buffay, the spiritual and flighty part of the six friends that everyone wanted to be a part of. Although the creators created for her a difficult background of a girl who was thrown onto the street after her father abandoned her and her mother took her own life — Phoebe was a mirror of optimism and goodness. One who is afraid that her bike will die because she doesn't ride it enough, and is willing to be a surrogate mother for her brother's triplets. "At first the character of Phoebe was very, very far from me," Kudrow said this year in a conversation with the legendary actress Lily Tomlin in Interview magazine. "I had to work hard to justify all the things she said and did. Not in an annoying way — on the contrary, it was fun. During the ten years of the series, a little bit of her seeped into me too. I became a little lighter, and even read books about spirituality and things like that, just to try to understand her. That's why I don't like to play characters that are too mean — I don't want to put them inside me".
"I won the lottery when I got into 'Friends'," she said in an interview with "Today". "Everything that came after was for me just a bonus. All I ever wanted was to be able to make a living from acting. That was the goal — and not only did I achieve it, I also got to work with people I love". But despite the huge success, Kudrow was never really satisfied. "After Matthew (Perry) died, I watched 'Friends' again," she said in an interview this year to the "Sunday Times". "Until then I saw only everything I did wrong or what I could have done better. But since then, for the first time I was really able to appreciate how great this series was. I felt I did a not-bad job, but Jennifer (Aniston) and Courteney (Cox)? Amazing. David (Schwimmer) and Matt (LeBlanc)? They made me laugh to tears. And of course there was Matthew — who was simply above us all".
"Today I am already able to watch 'Friends' without punishing myself," she added in the conversation with Tomlin. "I even try to make it my nightly viewing, to laugh a little before bed. But I am still bothered by the thought that someone will walk in and catch me watching myself. It's really embarrassing." Like Kudrow, who falls in love again with the series 20 years after it went off the air, "Friends" became a smashing success also with the younger generation that consumes it now. Even in the era of TikTok and smartphones, it seems there are those who yearn for a world where there are no phones, and a group of good friends who live together, spend all the time together and become a family. "'Friends' presents a kind of innocence, which perhaps the younger generation has not yet had the chance to experience," she explains.
Their friendship, which continued also off-screen and still exists today — led the group also to make history in the acting world: at the beginning of their path, in 1994, the group received $22,500 per episode, but instead of competing with each other they chose to negotiate as a group. The joining of forces grew to a million dollars per episode, and according to reports, Kudrow was one of the central figures in the negotiations. Thanks to the agreement, she, Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox became the highest-paid television actresses in the world at that time. But it is evident that that period was not really that innocent, when Kudrow tells about the writers' room at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, where the series was filmed. According to her, between 12 and 15 writers worked there — most of them men. "Don't forget that we filmed in front of a live audience of 400 people," she said. "If you messed up one of the lines of one of the writers, or the joke didn't get the perfect reaction, they could say: 'Does this bitch even know how to read? She's not even trying. She ruined my line'. And we knew that in the writers' room the guys would stay up late and talk about the sexual fantasies they had about Jennifer and Courteney. It was an intense environment".
Kudrow's words also refer to the sexual harassment affair that shook the production of "Friends" in 1999. Then the writers' assistant Amani Lyle sued Warner Bros. studios, claiming that in work meetings she was exposed to explicit sexual conversations, simulations of sexual acts and comments about Aniston and Cox. The lawsuit was dismissed, and Kudrow said that already then she chose to treat this atmosphere as part of the work. "It could have been cruel," she says. "But these people — most of whom were men — sat until three in the morning and tried to write the series. My approach was: 'Say about me what you want behind my back. As long as I don't hear it, it doesn't really matter'". Years later a similar plot would enter the first season of her series "The Comeback".
Another struggle of Kudrow was with her body image. "When I would see myself on TV, all I thought was: 'God, I'm just a mountain of a person'," she said in an interview to the podcast WTF with Marc Maron. "I was bigger than Courteney and Jennifer. Taller and bigger. I felt as if even my bones were bigger. I just felt like a giant woman next to them". Kudrow also admitted that during the years "Friends" aired she used to lose weight intentionally. Looking back, she says the thing that bothers her most is that the weight loss was always met with compliments. "Unfortunately, with women, if you are underweight — they say you look good," she said. But behind those compliments hid a completely different reality. "When I was too thin, I was sick all the time — colds, sinus infections. I was just sick non-stop". Only with the years, she says, she learned to stop looking for approval from the outside. Instead of fighting her body or fearing age, she learned to accept them. "I just say to myself: 'Okay, so you're older. That's actually a good thing. Why should it be a bad thing?'". And if she could go back in time and talk to her younger self, she already knows exactly what she would say to her: "Don't confuse the fact that people love your work with the fact that they love you," she said to Tomlin. "Don't wait for someone to give you permission to love yourself, because you will need it. In the end, you are all you have".
"'The Comeback' sounded to me like the most embarrassing word in the world"
Since "Friends" went off the air in 2004, Lisa Kudrow has not stopped working. She appeared in a long line of films and series, including "P.S. I Love You", "Easy A", "Grace and Frankie" and recently also "The Neighborhood" of Netflix alongside Ray Romano. But it seems that the role that most defined her career after Phoebe Buffay was not just another role — but Valerie Cherish, the character she created for "The Comeback". Cherish, a former sitcom star who tries to get her career back on track, reminds in many ways also Kudrow herself. Perhaps that is why she needed a slight separation, and after a decade in which Phoebe's long blonde hair became one of her trademarks, she knew that this time she needed to look different. "From the beginning it was clear to me that Valerie needed to be a redhead," she told Lily Tomlin. "Blonde characters are perceived as stupid, and brunettes as too serious. Redheads are both fun and smart — at least that's how I thought Valerie would see it".
For Kudrow, "The Comeback" was also the proof that she does not have to chase success on the scale of "Friends". "Thanks to the fact that I was there, I could create my own series that didn't have to be as big as 'Friends'. I could do something like 'The Comeback' or 'Web Therapy', and it was very satisfying". Kudrow created "The Comeback" together with Michael Patrick King, one of the prominent creators of "Sex and the City". At its center stands, as mentioned, Valerie, a former sitcom star who tries to return to the screen through a reality show that documents every moment of her comeback journey, during which she is also cast in a new, too-sexy sitcom. Through the character she not only examined the fears of Hollywood actors of obsolescence, but also the change that television itself underwent — from the world of sitcoms to the reality era, where cameras are no longer satisfied with the set, but invade also private life.
"When we started 'The Comeback', the very idea that people would humiliate themselves and give up all their self-respect for publicity was still relatively new," she told the "Times". According to her, this feeling only strengthened when she watched the first winner of "Survivor", Richard Hatch. "I thought to myself: 'This is the end of civilization'". Looking back, it is hard to understand how "The Comeback" was canceled already after one season — and not only because Kudrow also shows there extremely impressive acting abilities when she creates an unbearable, pathetic but also captivating character at the same time. But the series, which was ahead of its time when it dealt with the obsession with fame, reality culture and the cruelty of Hollywood, became over the years a series with a devoted niche audience. "The truth is that we received great responses while the series was airing," said Kudrow. "We heard that David Bowie called HBO before he went on a concert tour and said: 'I don't want to miss a single episode'. It was a shock when the series was canceled, but I wasn't crushed by it. I thought to myself: 'Okay, this is already beyond my control'. We knew we did something good. I'm proud of it".
But against all odds, the story of "The Comeback" has not yet ended. In 2014, almost a decade after it was canceled, it returned for a second season — this time to a world that already understood what Kudrow and King were trying to say from the beginning. In 2026 the series returned for a third and final season, which this time deals with one of the biggest threats to the entertainment industry: artificial intelligence. Valerie finds herself agreeing to star in a sitcom written entirely by AI, while the creators continue to use her to ask the same question that has accompanied the series for more than 20 years: what are people willing to sacrifice to remain relevant.
Also the place where the third season was filmed became a closing of a circle. Kudrow returned to Stage 24 at Warner Bros. studios — the same stage where "Friends" was also filmed. She said that in the 90s the cast members would wander between the studios with the stars of "ER", without imagining what a cultural phenomenon they were about to be. "None of us knew then what awaited us," she recalled. Also James Burrows was part of that closing of a circle. The legendary television director, who directed the first episode of "Friends" and played the director of the fictional sitcom already in the first season of "The Comeback", returned in the third season to play himself. In retrospect, this was also his last appearance on screen before he passed away last month. In one of the peak moments of the season he explains that true comedy can be created only by human beings — and not by artificial intelligence. It is hard to think of a more appropriate message for a series that was ahead of its time time after time. But perhaps the real closing of the circle is actually that of Kudrow herself. She who once saw the name "The Comeback" as almost an insult, looks at it today completely differently. "When we started with the series, this word was for me the most embarrassing thing in the world. It basically says: 'I disappeared'," she told Lily Tomlin. "It was embarrassing for me that my character is so desperate to return to the spotlight that she agrees to participate in a show with this name. Today it is already a word of celebration. We all love a comeback. We turned the word 'comeback' from embarrassing into something worth celebrating".
