In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actress recalled how sitcom casting often favored a specific kind of leading woman, and how she was told she did not fit that standard.
Lisa Kudrow Recalls the Comments That Shaped Her Early Career
Before “Friends” made her internationally famous, Kudrow was building her comedy career through improv and television roles. She had already worked with “The Groundlings” and appeared as Ursula Buffay on “Mad About You,” a character that eventually helped connect her to the world of “Friends.”
Source: IMDb
The performer remembers that the sitcom landscape had a fairly specific idea of what its female stars were supposed to look like. “I didn’t look like women who were getting cast as series regulars on sitcoms,” she recalled, describing an environment where actresses were expected to be conventionally attractive and appealing.
The feedback she received could be considerably more direct. “I was told, ‘It’s very hard because you’re not gorgeous, and they want gorgeous,’” Kudrow recalled. Rather than describing the comment as something she could not understand, she responded to it with a matter-of-fact attitude: “And I’m like, ‘Okay’… I don’t think that’s ridiculous. I got it.”
Her experience eventually led to one of television’s most enduring comedy performances. The A-lister joined “Friends” as Phoebe Buffay, the eccentric musician and masseuse whose unusual worldview became one of the show’s defining sources of humor. She appeared in all 236 episodes and won a Primetime Emmy Award for the role.
Kudrow also made clear that she never viewed being “cute” as the goal she was chasing. “I’m not ‘cute.’ And God, I didn’t want to be cute.” For an actress who would go on to spend a decade playing one of the most beloved sitcom characters of her generation, that distinction became an especially memorable part of her story.
