Key Takeaways
- Lisa Kudrow doesn’t mind fans quoting Phoebe Buffay or calling her by the character’s name, but she refuses requests to sing "Smelly Cat": "I really don’t want to do that."
- Kudrow said she has "zero complaints" about Friends and treasures the cast’s hard-earned bond, which they strengthened by spending downtime and playing poker together.
- She also revealed that she once lobbied to play Rachel Green, but the creators insisted she remain Phoebe because finding the right actor for the role had been so difficult.
Lisa Kudrow has revealed the one fan request she doesn't like to do, despite how much she loved her time working on Friends.
Appearing on a recent episode of NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, Kudrow was asked how she feels about being continuously identified with her character, Phoebe Buffay, decades after the show aired its last episode.
Kudrow said that she's fine with fans quoting Phoebe lines or even calling her by the character's name, but singing Phoebe's signature jingle on command is where she draws the line. "Sometimes people will stop me and say, 'Oh, sing Smelly Cat,'" she said. "I don't want to do that. I really don't want to do that." See her response here.
Despite that boundary, Kudrow told Fresh Air she has "zero complaints about Friends or anything to do with it," pointing to the cast's chemistry as the thing she values most.
"Just the relationship with the other actors; we had fun. That is so rare," she said. "Real honest respect, mutual. It was a really good relationship that took some work, and we did the work. It was great."
She added that the closeness was intentional, saying the cast made a point of spending downtime together on set, including regular poker games between takes.
Earlier this month, Kudrow told The Hollywood Reporter that she had originally lobbied to play Rachel Green, the role that ultimately went to Jennifer Aniston. "Idiot that I am, I went, 'Oh, but you know what? I got to say, Rachel is Jewish. And boy, I love doing a Jewish American Princess,'" she recalled, admitting she hadn't registered that Rachel was the show's romantic lead.
The creators shut it down quickly. According to Kudrow, they told her it was "so hard for them to find Phoebe" that they were "not messing with that" — a polite way, she noted, of communicating she was not being considered for the romantic lead.
Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe across all 10 seasons of the NBC sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004, and won an Emmy for the role in 1998. She is currently in contention for another Emmy, this time for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her HBO series The Comeback.
