Watch any episode of Friends and Phoebe Buffay surely stands out as one of the most hilarious and often times most confident characters on the show. But for Lisa Kudrow, she found that the latter wasn’t necessarily the case.
In an interview on the Podcrushed podcast, Kudrow revealed that the part-time masseuse, part-time musician’s confidence in the popular sitcom wasn’t too far off her own as a young adult.
“I was confident,” she told the show’s host. “And by the way, I half-think that if you are confident, but you have a weakness, that’s when the mob goes for you.”
But all of that changed once Friends began to gain major traction leaving the now 59-year-old to become a household name, thanks to her beloved guitar-playing character.
“It wasn’t until Friends that I realised, ‘Oh, I don’t look like I thought I looked’,” Kudrow said. “And that’s what was so jarring, and that’s when it was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to actually lose weight? I have to diet? Shoot’.”
Before the sitcom became an international hit, Kudrow had always considered herself a “stick” when it came to her body, but the way she viewed herself dramatically transformed while working alongside Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, who played Rachel Green and Monica Geller, respectively.
However, Kudrow was quick to point out that the pair were nothing but supportive of her.
“It wasn’t headlines, it was just seeing myself on the show,” she explained. “And seeing myself in clothes, and seeing Courteney and Jennifer in clothes, and at first I thought, ‘Oh, because they know, like, tailoring, so they can discuss it with the costume designer about where, exactly, to take something in’.”
So, when Kudrow would have to attend a fitting, the nerves crept in, and she decided to ask Cox and Aniston to accompany her. Naturally, and unsurprisingly, the women were more than happy to be by her side.
“Honestly, they were like sisters,” Kudrow said, adding, “That’s when I would see, ‘Oh, OK, it’s not just about tailoring’. You know? I’m not trying to say I was overweight, either. I just had no idea the shape of my actual body”.
This isn’t the first time that Kudrow has been vocal about the insecurities she felt while working on Friends. Back in 2019, she opened up about how she tried to lose weight during the show because she felt that she was “bigger” than her female co-stars.
“I’m already bigger than Courteney and Jennifer. [I was] taller, bigger. My bones feel bigger, I just felt like this mountain of a woman next to them,” she said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.
Thankfully, by the time she reached her “late ’30s or ’40s”, Kudrow realised why she should be learning to embrace her body again.
“I just realised, ‘Oh no, it’s OK. This is just what I look like. That’s OK’. I mean, do what you need to do to be healthy. But this is your body, it’s OK.”
