Lisa Kudrow Really Hated the 'Friends' Studio Audience

By Mike Redmond | TV | July 25, 2024 |

By Mike Redmond | TV | July 25, 2024 |

While Jennifer Aniston is slamming J.D. Vance over his childless cat lady remarks, Lisa Kudrow has been promoting her new Apple series, Time Bandits, which is getting very mixed reviews.

Naturally, Kudrow’s marketing blitz involves dishing dirt on Friends, and the Phoebe Buffay actress clearly wants anyone who sat in the studio audience to know that you made her life a living hell.

Kudrow made the revelation on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast, and apparently, the major issue is the live audience would laugh for “too long,” and worse, Kudrow could tell it was fake laughter. She also didn’t hold back her frustration.

“It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me,” Kudrow said via Variety. “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.”

According to Kudrow, the audience were given specific instructions not to get carried away with raucous laughter because the show is not being made for them; it’s being made for the TV viewers at home. But they didn’t listen, and Kudrow would repeatedly find herself just nodding on film waiting for them to stop. As if that wasn’t bad enough, their reaction started to affect the writing.

Kudrow noted that “Friends” would often spend six to eight hours filming just one half-hour episode, so the production would do “so many takes” that eventually the audience would “stop laughing.” The writers would then react by thinking the material no longer worked, thus forcing rewrites and more takes.

“But it worked the first time!” Kudrow said. “All I knew is you’re going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is. Who is suffering because they’re not laughing? I am okay if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going.”

Over the years, there have been anecdotes that the cast of Friends were not always in the best of mood on set or warm and welcoming to guest stars. Having your show constantly rewritten because of an unruly circus will do that. I dunno if it’d be enough to make me shitty with Paul Rudd, but we all have our Vietnams. (Looking at you, Sherlock Gnomes.)

You can watch Kudrow’s full interview with Conan below: