The cast of US sitcom Friends only met up once between the show’s final episode and the reunion special, Lisa Kudrow has said.
The actress, who played Phoebe Buffay in the hit show, said her and her co-stars Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry, rarely got together as a six after the show finished in 2004.
She said there was only one occasion a decade after the final episode had aired where the group had dinner.
After that, it wasn’t until Friends: The Reunion, which aired in 2021, that they were all in the same room together again.
“We only had dinner, the six of us, once before, since the show had ended,” Kudrow told Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his podcast Dinner’s On Me.
Despite reuniting 10 years after the show ended, the actress said she felt the group “didn’t miss a beat”.
“It was so great that it was like ‘we should do this more’,” the 61-year-old said.
Speaking about the reunion special, where the cast appeared as themselves and reflected on some of the show’s most iconic moments and famous sets, Kudrow said: “To have all of us together on the set, you never know when it will be impossible.”
‘It shook us up’
Last year Perry, who played Chandler Bing in the show, died at the age of 54 from the “acute effects of ketamine”. He was found dead at his home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles.
Kudrow said the death of her former co-star was “a big jolt”.
“It shook us up, I have to say,” she said, adding: “He [Perry] said it won’t be a surprise, but it will be a shock, and that was exactly right. So smart, that is true – it wasn’t a surprise, but it was a shock.
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“It was a big jolt.
“Personally, I think he died happy. I think in the days around his passing, I think he was happy and excited about what’s happening next.”
Kudrow said she began to rewatch old episodes of Friends to aid the grieving process.
“Schwimmer was hilarious, Matt LeBlanc was making me laugh out loud, Jennifer, come on, she’s so good, look what she just did,” she said.
“And Courteney, oh my God, you’re hilarious… And Matthew, of course, at the time he was blowing me away.”
Out of the 236 episodes of the show, Kudrow said there are still some she has not seen, as there is a “certain amount of anxiety around watching”.
“I’m afraid of what my takeaway is going to be,” she said.
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“When Phoebe got married and she’s walking down the aisle and has this huge smile on her face, I teared up because she was so happy, she was so honestly happy.
“It was really touching to me, she deserves to be this happy.”
Friends focused on a group of six twentysomethings living in New York and first aired in the US on 22 September 1994.
By the time it left screens a decade later, it was a pop culture phenomenon and remains one of the most popular shows on television.
