“If you’re getting hysterical, someone slaps you back,” she said of LeBlanc’s ability to help ground herself. “You’re like, ‘Oh, thanks. That’s what I needed'”
During an appearance on Sirius XM’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name on July 31, the Friends alum, 61, opened up about how her former costar helped her ease some anxiety about her portrayal as Phoebe Buffay during the sitcom’s early days.
In an admission to co-host Ted Danson, Kudrow confessed that it took her “if not a year and a half, maybe two seasons, before I felt like I had Phoebe down.” “The things she said were so outrageously illogical that in order for me to justify them, you know, I felt like ‘Oof!'” she recalled. “It just took a lot of work to figure out, “All right, how is it possible that I think this is true or a good idea or a reasonable thing to say?”
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Kudrow explained that she put in real “acting work” into her character but it wasn’t until she was into her second or third season that she felt that something was off. “I’m like, ‘Something’s wrong,’ ‘cause I’m not doing the work I was doing,” she said. “I’m slacking off. I’m being lazy and I was getting really mad at myself, and LeBlanc came. He said, ‘What’s going on with you?’ I said, ‘I’m being lazy. I’m not doing the work that I did first season, second season. I’m not doing the work I did for Phoebe, so it can’t be good.'”
“And he went, ‘No, you know who the character is now. You don’t need to do the work you did. You got it,” and I went, ‘What? Oh,'” she continued. Danson noted how with LeBlanc’s help she was finally able to feel “relaxed.”
“That was enough,” Kudrow said. “It’s sort of like someone shook me ‘cause I was getting hysterical. I wasn’t literally getting hysterical, but you know like if you’re getting hysterical, someone slaps you back. You’re like, ‘Oh, thanks. That’s what I needed.'”
Earlier this month, Kudrow appeared on Conan O’Brien’s Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and revealed that she recently started being able to watch Friends again following the death of her costar Matthew Perry, who died at age 54 in October 2023.
“I used to not be able to watch it at all,” she explained. “I mean, 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. And then well, listen. 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.”
