I’ll be there for you… but we need to process first.
Lisa Kudrow recently opened up about the behind-the-scenes “work” it took to make sure the friendships on Friends were the real thing. “We really did get along,” she explained on a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, but “we also worked hard at being friends. That six-way relationship took some work and we did it.”
When asked what that work looked like, Kudrow responded, “Really talking things through. If someone said something or did something, it didn’t get too big, because it was, ‘Can I talk to you?’ Usually not me because I had to learn to — ‘Can I talk to you about something?’ Because I never knew that was allowed. But I saw it modeled really well by [ Courteney Cox] and [Jennifer Aniston] and [Matt LeBlanc].”Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
It’s been 20 years since Friends went off the air. The iconic sitcom ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004, maintaining its juggernaut status in the ratings game virtually the entire time.
One key to the success of Friends, and its remarkable staying power in the culture, is how genuine the friendships at its core seem. The roommate relationship between Aniston’s Rachel and Cox’s Monica, the sibling-like friendship between Kudrow’s Phoebe and LeBlanc’s Joey, the bro bond between Joey and Matthew Perry’s Chandler — people may still yearn for a Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel-style relationship, but it’s the palpably close friendships that keep fans coming back for rewatch after rewatch.According to Kudrow, the secret to lasting friendship, both on and off screen, can be summed up in two words: “respectful communication.”
It’s clear that the bonds have endured long after the cameras stopped rolling. The Friends cast has reunited more times in the past 20 years than the core cast members of most series ever do in a lifetime. Cox and Aniston in particular maintain a close friendship, with Cox recently celebrating her former onscreen roomie’s birthday on Instagram with the caption, “Happy Birthday my sweet Jenny Louise. Also don’t know why I call her that… but I sure do love you.”The cast seem to have pulled even closer together in the months since Perry’s death. The actor died in October 2023, and each of his castmates continue to pay moving tribute to him, from Kudrow rewatching the series for the first time as a way of “celebrating how hilarious he was,” to LeBlanc saying the times he shared with Perry were “among the favorite times of my life.”
