Three decades after Friends premiered, Lisa Kudrow still has one complaint about filming in front of a live audience.
Kudrow, 60, revealed during a recent appearance on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast that she often thought there was too much laughter from the audience on set. Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on the NBC sitcom, would get annoyed when the pauses went on for “too long.”
“It wasn’t that funny. … It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me,” she said. “Now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show. There are other lines. Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘Come on.’ Really angry.”
Kudrow explained that the show was really geared toward those watching at home. “A TV show is not for the studio audience,” she continued. “It is made for the TV viewers at home. That’s who we are in service to. If it was 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.”
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Breaking up the flow of the episode was a challenge for the actors. “It’s being filmed and now I’m just standing there … ‘Yeah, I said that.’ It’s terrible. They instructed our audience not to do anything like that, I think.”
Friends ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. Kudrow recalled that some episodes would require “so many takes” that filming took six to eight hours — and sometimes, the audience would “stop laughing.”
“All I knew is you’re going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is,” she said. “Who is suffering because they’re not laughing? I am OK if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going.”
Earlier this year, Friends alum Jennifer Aniston claimed during Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series that Kudrow “hated” holding for laughs from the studio audience.
“She’d be like, ‘I’m not done! It’s not that funny!’” Aniston, 55, recalled.
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Kudrow later clarified in a conversation with Entertainment Tonight that she loved the process of filming Friends despite its challenges.
“God bless them. They were so excited to be there that sometimes the laughter would just be longer than if they would have laughed at anything else,” she said of the audience members.
Along with Kudrow and Aniston, Friends starred Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry, who died in October 2023 at the age of 54.
