TV & Movies
Lisa Kudrow Reveals What “Irritated” Her About Filming Friends
“It wasn’t that funny.”
Lisa Kudrow loved working on Friends for over 10 years — but there was one surprising thing that annoyed her. On the July 23 episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast, Kudrow said that she often got irritated with the live studio audience while filming Friends over their exaggerated reactions, which her co-star Jennifer Aniston told O’Brien.
“They were laughing for too long,” Kudrow explained. “It wasn’t that funny. It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me. Now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show. There are other lines. Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘Come on.’ Really angry.”
She argued that a TV show is made for viewers at home, not the studio audience, and while their laughter is appreciated, it could be disruptive to the actors.
“If it was a stage play, laugh as long as you want,” she clarified. “I’ll figure out things to keep my character busy waiting to continue with it. That’s fine. 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.”
However, Kudrow explained that the writers depended on the studio audience’s reactions, often to their detriment. She said it usually took six to eight hours to film one episode of Friends, and they did so many takes that the audience would eventually stop laughing at repeated jokes, leading the writers to rewrite and create more takes.
“But it worked the first time!” Kudrow pointed out. “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.”
Aniston revealed this tidbit about her co-star during her Variety Actors On Actors interview with Quinta Brunson. “Lisa Kudrow, by the way, hated when the audience laughed,” she said, laughing. “She’d be like, ‘Ugh, are you still — I’m not done! It’s not that funny!’” Clearly, viewers disagreed.
