Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow are looking back at their time on Friends. In an interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors issue, the women, who starred as Rachel Green and Phoebe Buffay, respectively, recalled the first time they met at the first table read for the sitcom.
“You were wearing an appropriate Phoebe Buffay — like a white linen, hippie shirt, and you had a bunch of seashells and necklaces on. And you had your hair pulled up in two little clips, and you had these little blond tendrils. So, so, so beautiful!” Aniston said of Kudrow’s outfit for the table read.
“Oh, God bless,” Kudrow responded. “Gee whiz! I was trying to get into the character.”
“I know! Still thought you were auditioning, and you actually already had the job,” Aniston quipped.
Both Aniston and Kudrow look back fondly at their time on Friends, so much so that they’ve often found themselves watching bloopers from the show.
“I love stumbling on a Friends episode. This one time I was with Courteney [Cox], and we were trying to find something to reference, an old Friends thing,” Aniston said. “And then we stumbled on… bloopers online and we sat there at the computer like two nerds watching these bloopers laughing at ourselves.”
“I’ve done it too,” Kudrow confessed. “I’ve done that, hours watching bloopers.”
Even when she’s just watching an episode of the show and not the bloopers, Aniston said she can often remember when she and the other actors “broke” in a scene.
“You and I would always get into these fits of laughter because… you were about to hit your punchline, and you would do this adorable thing where you would break,” Aniston said. “You would say the punchline, and you would always turn to the audience and say, ‘I’m sorry, it’s really funny.'”
“If I knew I was going, I wouldn’t say the punchline — I didn’t want to ruin it,” Kudrow said.
“You did have an ability to giggle, to break during the punchline,” Aniston agreed. “Because you as Lisa also thought it was funny, what Phoebe was saying. Which was so endearing… And then I would watch you do that, and then I would break. We were terrible.”
Their time on the show was so positive that Kudrow said she has had “a commitment issue” with other series in the years since.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh, it was such hard work for 10 years.’ It’s not that,” she explained. “It was that I know that show worked because we all committed to each other too. It wasn’t just committing to a role, committing to a contract. We all still love each other. Our cast is like that, and that’s why that worked. I think part of me died. I can’t do that again.”
Aniston and Kudrow will get a chance to reunite with the rest of the Friends cast — Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer — in an HBO Max special later this year. Marta Kauffman, the show’s co-creator, recently revealed that they’re hoping to film the reunion in August, should coronavirus restrictions allow.
“I think it’s going to be really fun also when we, if we ever get out of quarantine, get to do our reunion show,” Aniston said.
“Yes, that will be really great. I can’t wait to do that. I really can’t wait to do that,” Kudrow agreed. “Yeah, we don’t know everything about it, we need to say. I think we’re meant to be surprised by some things as well.”
“We know it’s not scripted, that we know,” Aniston noted. “I will not be Rachel, although I kind of am. Well, we’re all sort of little fragments of them. Not really, but yeah.”
When 360aproko spoke with Kudrow last month, the actress gushed about the upcoming reunion.
“The six of us haven’t been in a room together in front of people in 25 years and only once a few years ago, privately for dinner,” she said. “I can only imagine. It’s gonna be fun. I mean, it’ll be really fun.”
