In the summer of 1994, six struggling actors, all of whom had bounced around the fringes of TV comedy in the years prior, were flown on a private plane to Las Vegas. The director James Burrows, a sitcom veteran with the comic instincts of a master clown and the wisdom of a prophet, sat them down inside a restaurant and shared something that instilled in them a curious mix of fear and elation. This moment, he insisted, would be the final time they’d ever be able to socialise in public together without anyone noticing them. Because once their new show hit the airwaves? The one initially titled Insomnia Cafe, then Six of One, then finally – and immortally – Friends? Forget it.
“I remember everyone going oooooh,” Lisa Kudrow laughs – 32 years, 236 episodes and roughly a thousand renditions of “Smelly Cat” later. “Everyone but me, anyway. I was the odd one out. I thought… maybe? I mean, it’s a good show, but I don’t know about that.” She scrunches up her nose. “But I’m just that kind of person.”
The great irony of Lisa Kudrow’s career is that she’s long been the comic face of the cynical and unconventional while being world-famous for the total opposite: in the world of culture, Friends was, is, and will always be Coca-Cola. Or Microsoft, or Amazon, or a great big sloppy cheeseburger. We gleefully inject its shiny toxins into our veins whenever we’re feeling miserable. But think about it and Phoebe Buffay, with her tragic mother, juvenile homelessness and terrible music, always had one foot outside the inner circle of Friends. “You’re not related, you live far away,” Rachel once told her in a fit of pique. “You lift right out!”
And then there’s the rest of Kudrow’s lopsided creations: the well-intentioned dippyness of second-banana Michele, from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion; the repressed melancholy of Lucia, her character in Don Roos’ cult dark comedy The Opposite of Sex; the ludicrous yet endearing narcissism of Valerie Cherish, her once-faded, still-vaguely-slumming-it sitcom actor in The Comeback, which has just launched its third and final season. Whether she’s being watched by billions – or half a dozen gays at an afters – Kudrow’s always been “the other”.
I tell her this in a London hotel decked out in the luxe glamour of HBO Max, which has just launched in the UK. Kudrow is perplexed, then not, then receptive. “Gee, I dunno… what? Because that’s! A new… thought.” She puts vocal emphasis in what feels like all the wrong places. It’s discombobulating, then not, then hilarious. Next to her is Michael Patrick King, her Comeback co-creator and the TV showrunner we all loved for Sex and the City and whom we all wanted to pelt with tomatoes for its cursed follow-up And Just Like That. He totally gets what I mean. “Look at how many magnificent not-chosen characters Lisa has played,” he says. “Or don’t-look-at-me characters. It’s really special. And it’s what’s so thrilling about Valerie – we’re taking the outsider and making her the main character. She’s a character so outside that you can’t look away.”
Valerie was first introduced in 2005, a year after Friends went off the air. She is Kudrow’s endearing, mortifying and too-eager baby, an actor with a modicum of early Nineties fame who’s done everything in her power to avoid total Hollywood exile – even if that means persevering through a rolodex of humiliations in the process. In The Comeback’s first season, she agreed to film a reality show all about her return to television, in the role of a fruitlessly horny, puppy-eating scold renting an apartment to a quartet of sexy singles. Kudrow gives one of TV’s greatest ever performances, wearing a desperate smile as indignities rain down upon her, her desire to be seen at any cost propelling her through a series of misadventures. The show itself was mean, satirical and caustic. “The socially painful can be hilarious,” King says. “People just didn’t get it.”
I wonder if that pain stems from Kudrow’s own life, but I then have second thoughts. She’s so sparkly. “Don’t worry, you’re not bringing the mood down,” she interrupts. “You can’t help it with this show, because it’s hitting on deep stuff.” She thinks it’s why it was met with a mixed response back in 2005. “People were watching it covering their eyes. They’d say ‘it’s so cringe’. But really it’s so human. It taps into all of our worst fears.”
The Comeback was cancelled after its first season, the New York Times proclaiming it lacked the (wait for it) subtlety and charm of Mark Wahlberg’s gorily butch Entourage, which it followed in the HBO schedules on Sunday nights. “We had to just surrender to that decision,” Kudrow says now. “We weren’t going to knock on doors begging them to bring it back,” King adds.
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But then something funny happened: The Comeback did come back. It developed a following on DVD, and renewed appreciation for its prescience. Fame was changing, shamelessness became the de facto mode of American life, and gallows comedy was suddenly king. Valerie wasn’t just a character but a Cassandra. A second season arrived in 2014, and saw Valerie cast on a dark drama series about the making of the sitcom she made in season one – this was meta on meta on meta. And now, 12 years later, comes season three, with Valerie cast on the world’s first sitcom written by AI. It’s arguably the show’s most nihilistic season yet, with Valerie grinning her way through an industry that’s become increasingly tech-driven and soulless. I found it funny, but also left the eight episodes in existential despair.
“I think it’s able to be funny because Valerie doesn’t get existential,” Kudrow says. “She doesn’t take a moral stand on anything, unless she’s performing a moral stand, you know?”
Do she and King feel hopeful about the future of entertainment? Because I admit I couldn’t tell. “We’re hoping the existential fear of it all is theoretical as opposed to a prediction,” King says. “I mean, back in 2005 we thought reality TV was going to destroy all television – then we went on to have what they called the ‘second golden age of television’. So you never know how humans will shift and adapt.”
There’s a scene in the season three finale, though, in which an eerily upbeat studio head played by Andrew Scott tells Valerie that he’s not looking to make great television, but merely “good enough television”. Kudrow talks me down off the ledge. “If this will make you feel better, there have always been shows that are not great,” she laughs. King agrees. “Back in the olden days of TV, they had shows that were known as home runs, and shows that were secretly called ‘base hits’ behind the scenes,” he says. “They were just something to fill the eight-thirty slot. Then at nine, the home run comes on.” In other words, America’s NBC broadcast Friends at 8pm and Seinfeld at 9pm, and something like The Single Guy, Union Square or Suddenly Susan in the middle. And who remembers them?
Friends, of course, was a behemoth. But it’s also a bit of an anomaly in Kudrow’s life. Unlike her co-stars, who’d worked as models and pop video extras (like Courteney Cox), or in dramatic theatre (like David Schwimmer), or across short runs of speedily cancelled sitcoms (like Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc), Kudrow studied biology at university and initially had her sights set on becoming an expert in cluster headaches (!) like her father, a doctor. But then she found the famed Los Angeles improv comedy troupe The Groundlings, where she impressed with eccentric sketch characters like “self-serving actress on a talk show” (who’d eventually inspire Valerie), and “airhead in the ladies’ bathroom” (who’d eventually become Michele). She gravitated towards broad pastiche, the lonely, and the secretly sad.
“Those parts just hit close to home,” she says. “I wasn’t ever in the popular group. I had friends, so I was always fine.” She corrects herself. “Actually, apart from a moment in junior high where I had zero friends. But I eventually had friends.” Many of whom were, ultimately, gay men. I wonder if Kudrow has ever wondered what it is about her that appeals to gay people, or if that might feel a bit navel-gazing. “No, I have!” she says. “But I ask questions about everything. I’m a biology major – it’s nothing but ‘why’. But honestly, I’ve always felt safer when gay men were running things. And I’ve always felt like gay men just get me.”
“It goes back to the resilience of people who aren’t chosen,” King says. “It’s very queer. It’s very Lisa.”
When Friends blew up, early into its second season, Kudrow didn’t experience much of a professional boost. “Nobody cared about me,” she laughs. “There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as ‘the sixth Friend’.”
King guffaws. “No way! But you were the first Friend to win an Emmy, right?” (Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, in 1998.)
“Yeah,” Kudrow shrugs. “But there was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have. There was just, like, ‘boy is she lucky she got on that show’.” The silver lining to this, of course, was that she could do what she wanted outside of it. She mentions the 1996 Albert Brooks comedy Mother, in which she had a minor role. “Albert Brooks!” she hoots, with pointed reverence. Then she mentions Clockwatchers, a gorgeous 1997 indie about downbeat female friends working in neighbouring office cubicles. “That was with Toni Collette and Parker Posey,” she says. “Toni Collette and Parker Posey!” she repeats, practically in capital letters. It was only a few years later that things started to shift. In 1999, she made the Robert De Niro comedy Analyze This, about a mob boss in therapy, “and that’s when the agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things.” She screws up her face, mock-horrified. “I knew that wasn’t gonna work. I’m just not adorable!”
Many will disagree, of course. But I suppose there was something formidable at times about Phoebe. Remember how much she hated Ross? Or would always threaten Chandler with physical violence? Off-camera, there was also a bit of a media narrative back then that claimed Kudrow was the ball-buster of the show – that it was her idea for all six cast members to negotiate their salaries not as individuals, but as a collective. Pay them what they’re worth, they said, or they’d walk. Backed into a corner, NBC eventually ponied up a then-unprecedented (and, to this day, highly rare) $1m an episode.
“I absolutely was not the ringleader,” Kudrow says. “And that was reported, and it wasn’t true. My team were very angry about that. It was leaked sort of as a warning to other clients like, ‘don’t do something like that’.” Kudrow thought at the time that it would probably be a good thing for her credibility. “Like, ‘hey, people will think I’m really smart!’. But my team were like, ‘no this is not good! We’re furious that they’re saying this about you’.”
Does she think the same thing would happen today? “Probably,” she says.
King thinks it definitely would. “It was a negotiation with the most powerful cast on television, and power makes its own rules,” he says. “When the power is all in the actors’ hands, that’s terrifying for [the studio heads].”
Kudrow and King don’t have more plans for The Comeback, and have billed season three as its final run. “Luckily, unlike Valerie, we don’t have to worry about our rent,” King says, “so we don’t have to make the show unless there’s something we really want to say.”
But for Kudrow at least, the show will live on in the Valerie-isms that have slipped into her day-to-day speech. Like that demonstrative way Valerie yells “see!”, or her vaguely insincere utterances of “isn’t that cute”.
“I’ll hear her in my head all the time,” Kudrow says, “and I have to tell myself not to say some of it out loud.” Often she can’t help it. “I did it in front of Anna Kendrick once, who turned out to be a fan,” she laughs. “She was like, ‘oh my god, that was Valerie!’ I was so embarrassed. But she just slipped out like a burp, you know?”
‘The Comeback’ is streaming on HBO Max
