Lisa Kudrow has revealed that although the cast members of Friends remained close both on-screen and off-screen, all the trouble and conflict were between the actors and the show’s writers.
More than two decades after the show concluded, Kudrow told The Times in an April 23 interview that things were not as friendly as one might expect, given the program’s name.
Friends, starring Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, and Matt LeBlanc, aired between 1994 and 2004, becoming one of the most popular sitcoms ever made for TV.
According to Kudrow, the cast members continued to maintain a tight bond even after the shooting had ceased.
However, there was a problem with the writers whenever something had to be performed before a live audience. Kudrow stated that the writers’ language was extremely offensive whenever someone failed to deliver a joke.
“If you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response, they could be like, ‘Can’t the b—h f—king read?’ They would say, ‘She’s not even trying. She f—ked up my line.'”
The writer also noted that the issue didn’t end there. She mentioned the private chats in which the writers, whom she said were mostly men, engaged in explicit discussions about the cast members.
“We knew that back in the room, the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney,” she added. “It was intense.”
She said that she had developed her own coping mechanism for dealing with such an environment. “My attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter,'” she said.
She also mentioned that the show’s schedule contributed to the hostility in the environment, stating that the writers usually stayed up late to finish the episode script. They would sometimes spend more than three hours completing the script and describe the environment as brutal.
