Lisa Kudrow Is The Hardest Working, Most Talented ‘Friends’ Alum

Versatility is a characteristic Hollywood claims to prize. The Academy loves to give out Oscars to pretty people playing ugly people or straight people playing doomed gay people or able-bodied people playing disabled people. It loves to laud these actors as brave. But more often, Hollywood has a tendency to pigeonhole. Shooting to superstardom in a particular part, especially on a network sitcom watched by millions of viewers each week, can be a mixed blessing. There’s the money, of course, and the fame. But there’s also the fact that you will forever be associated with that character. Some actors seem to embrace it: Jerry Seinfeld appears content to rest on his (completely earned) Seinfeld laurels. Others seem to be unable to escape it: try as he might, Jaleel White will never be able to fully shake Steve Urkel. And then there are those few rare oddities who are able to both benefit from and transcend their sitcom success. None are as impressive as Lisa Kudrow.

Kudrow parlayed what was supposed to be a one-scene guest role — an unnamed, inept waitress on Mad About You — into a 23-episode run as Ursula Buffay, one of that sitcom’s most beloved recurring characters (Interestingly enough: Kudrow was actually on 24 episodes of the wildly popular sitcom, having appeared in a first season episode as “Karen,” Paul Reiser’s character’s date on the night he meets Helen Hunt’s Jamie). From there, she was cast in her most famous role as Friends’ Phoebe Buffay, Ursula’s identical twin sister.

Friends made superstars out of its six lead actors; by the end of the show’s run, they were each making $1 million per episode, unprecedented money (Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, and Lisa Kudrow are still the highest-paid TV actresses of all time) that would allow any of them to enjoy an early retirement. Some of them — David Schwimmer — pretty much did just that. Some of them struggled to break out of the long shadows cast by their Friends characters. Matt LeBlanc attempted (and failed) to continue riding the wave with his doomed spin-off Joey, but ultimately found success playing a cartoonish version of himself on Showtime��s Episodes. Jennifer Aniston became more famous for her personal life and product endorsements. But Kudrow continued to work: acting, writing, and producing (sometimes all at once), parlaying her sitcom success into a bona fide career in entertainment. How did she manage to leverage her Friends fame and use it to become one of Hollywood’s most successful polyglots?

Lisa Kudrow is funny. That fact is so glaringly obvious to anyone who has seen her work that it almost feels absurd to point it out. But it’s also something that people tend to take for granted, to generalize. Because of her role on Friends, her long blonde hair, and her ability to slip into that ditzy, New Age-y nasal drone like it’s nothing, the impulse to categorize her as a type, “The Dumb Blonde,” can be strong. The fact that during the run of Friends, she co-starred in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion — a film in which she plays another dumb blonde — on the surface doesn’t appear to help buck this crude generalization.

But I think that Romy and Michele was the first instance where we saw what she was truly capable of. Her performance as Michele, the former back brace-wearing, fashion-obsessed high school outcast who creates a new persona to attend and exact delicious revenge at her 10-year high school reunion, is suffused with a deep melancholy. Who hasn’t harbored fantasies about getting back at the people who were terrible to them in high school, even if nothing in their current reality merits it? Her dreams of sticking it to her former classmates are limited by the fact that she’s hiding behind a facade, until, of course, she isn’t. Once she sheds the gimmick, ditches the black power suit for a dress of her own design (that gets the attention of one of her former classmates who is now, of course, an editor at Vogue), and engages in one of modern film’s best three-way dance scenes, Michele comes into her own. The film ends on a note of fan service wish fulfillment, but you love these deeply flawed, terribly misguided characters so much by that point that you can’t help but revel in it. Re-watching the film recently, I saw a comedic actress at the top of her game. It must have been hard to imagine at that time what she could possibly do next.

Well, she continued acting on Friends. And then went on to thrive in nearly every other acting arena. Having conquered the network sitcom (Mad About You, Friends), she took to film (Romy and Michele, The Opposite of Sex), premium cable (the flawless, difficult to succinctly categorize, docu-reality-dramedy cringe-fest The Comeback), the nascent landscape of web series (Web Therapy, which went on to find a life on premium cable), and even a foray into Shondaland (Scandal, in which she played congresswoman and presidential hopeful Josephine Marcus and delivered a searing monologue on sexism in politics that had audiences across the country — and across the Internet — cheering).

The only thing missing from this impressive line-up is a bow on the Great White Way. In a recent conversation with Vulture’s TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Kudrow revealed that Broadway is definitely on her radar, probably when her son goes off to college, if she’s asked. (Broadway producers: ask her. Just imagine her sinking her teeth into an Edward Albee or a Christopher Durang or a Will Eno play or, frankly, most anything. Given her incredible chops and range, I think she could even be up to play Blanche DuBois.)

Beyond acting, she extended her reach to other areas of Hollywood: writing and producing. It seems like every other day an actor creates a production company, and many times it is clearly a vanity project. There are exceptions, of course. Reese Witherspoon, in an attempt to champion female-driven material, created the production company Pacific Standard, which last year found incredible success with the films Gone Girl and Wild. Over ten years earlier, Kudrow and her producing partner Dan Bucatinsky created Is or Isn’t Entertainment. The company’s first series was The Comeback, which Kudrow co-wrote, produced, and starred in.

In her discussion with Matt Zoller Seitz, Kudrow shared that the inspiration for the show, which follows Valerie Cherish, a washed up sitcom star attempting to restart her career by appearing on a reality show that follows her as she stars as the landlady Aunt Sassy on a sitcom, Room and Bored, that features nubile twentysomethings, grew out of her fear of what the then burgeoning genre of reality TV might have in store for our culture. “I was just shocked and horrified by reality TV,” she said. “[In 2005, when The Comeback premiered] there had only been, like, Survivor. Amazing Race was in its second season only and there were no housewives — they had The Osbournes and Anna Nicole Smith, and I thought, ‘This can’t end well.’ And unfortunately, it’s true for some of those people. I really was thinking, ‘Some people actually won’t survive this.’”

The show succeeds because of its incisive writing, keen direction, and a bravura performance from Kudrow, who is one of the only actresses I have ever seen wear humiliation and pride on her face simultaneously. It also succeeds because of its sense — and I believe it’s Kudrow’s sense — of what’s going on in the culture. It’s something she’s always adroitly capitalized on. With Phoebe, she fed into the ’90s obsession with all things New Age and bohemian. With Web Therapy, she lambasted both the culture of psychological analysis and our growing dependence on technology (all of the therapy sessions conducted by her character, Fiona Wallice, take place via video chat). And with The Comeback, she tackled not only the reality TV genre, but — especially in its second season — what it means to be a woman in Hollywood, especially in an era where more and more female celebrities are comfortable labeling themselves feminists but so few of them are able to ascend to positions in which they can enact anything close to resembling a feminist ethos.

She also applied her dismay at the reality TV landscape to producing reality projects that aim higher than portraying wine glass-hurling socialites or meatheads living together at the beach. Is or Isn’t Entertainment produced the reality series Who Do You Think You Are?, which allows celebrities the opportunity to explore their family trees. Most recently, it produced It Got Better, a web series that features gay celebrities sharing their stories. In a time when LGBT youth are constantly bullied and suicide rates are significantly higher than those of their peers, this feels less like reality programming than a real lifeline for kids in need.

Hollywood can be inflexible. If you turn in an iconic performance, like Lisa Kudrow did on Friends, the industry can work really hard to keep you in that restrictive box. But through a combination of business savvy, cultural awareness, and pure talent, Lisa Kudrow has exploded that box. Speaking with Matt Zoller Seitz, she shared that the future was unclear for both Web Therapy and The Comeback. But one thing is clear: whatever she does next, it will certainly be something worth watching.

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

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Photos: Everett Collection