Friends is one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time but, as a product of its time, it also involved filming in front of a live audience who reacted to the scenes in the show. However, one of the actors wasn’t really happy about it.
Speaking on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, Lisa Kudrow addressed her frustrations filming in front of a studio audience. The actress played one of the six lead characters, Phoebe Buffay, throughout the show’s ten seasons. However, while the audience was real and didn’t use a tape to fake the laugh, Kudrow explained that the laughter didn’t always feel like “an honest response” and it ended up creating some frustrations “because they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny. That’s why.”
“It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me,” Kudrow continued. “Now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show,” the actress went on. “There are other lines. Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘Come on.’ Really angry.”
“A TV show is not for the studio audience,” she explained. “It is made for the TV viewers at home. That’s who we are in service to. If it was a stage play, yeah, laugh as long as you want. I’ll figure out things to keep my character busy waiting to continue with it. That’s fine.” She continued, “It’s being filmed and now I’m just standing there … you do like nod, ‘Yeah, I said that.’ It’s terrible. They instructed our audience not to do anything like that, I think.”
Kudrow also explained how filming happened for the NBC sitcom and that actors would do multiple takes for a scene and that it would take six to eight hours to film each episode. During the “many takes” the audience would stop laughing, leading writers to believe the material wasn’t working. “But it worked the first time!” Kudrow shared. “All I knew is you’re going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is. Who is suffering because they’re not laughing? I am okay if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going.”
Kudrow echoes what her co-star Jennifer Aniston previously explained about the actress during her Variety’s Actors on Actors segment. “Lisa Kudrow, by the way, hated when the audience laughed. She’d be like, ‘I’m not done! It’s not that funny!'”
Lisa Kudrow Revealed She Has a New Reason to Rewatch Friends
Last October, Friends actor Matthew Perry shockingly passed away. Kudrow joined co-stars Jennifer Anniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer shared a joint statement following the news of Perry’s death, and they all attended his funeral. Now, watching him on the small screen gave Kudrow a new reason to revisit Friends.”Honestly, I wasn’t able to watch it because it’s too embarrassing to watch yourself,” she confirmed. “But if I make it about Matthew, then that’s OK. And it’s just celebrating how hilarious he was — and that is what I want to remember [about him].”
