TV & Movies
Lisa Kudrow Is Rewatching Friends In Honor Of Matthew Perry
The actor wants to remember “how hilarious he was.”
Like numerous fans, Lisa Kudrow is revisiting Friends — but unlike many of them, it’s not part of her usual routine. Speaking recently to The Hollywood Reporter, Kudrow revealed she started rewatching the hit sitcom, on which she played Phoebe Buffay for 10 seasons, to remember her late co-star Matthew Perry.
“I wasn’t able to watch it because it’s too embarrassing to watch yourself. But if I make it about Matthew, then that’s OK,” she explained. “And it’s just celebrating how hilarious he was — and that is what I want to remember [about him].”
Kudrow added that she’s been “laughing out loud” while revisiting the show, which aired between 1994 and 2004. “Everyone is hilarious,” she said of her Friends co-stars Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer.
“Matthew, obviously, is just uniquely hilarious,” she continued. “No one ever knew that cadence or comedic rhythm before him.”
In her THR interview, Kudrow also confessed to laughing at her own scenes, sharing that she’ll rewatch the show to mark any Friends milestones.
“I mean, that’s my own little way of celebrating [the anniversaries], just watching it,” she said. “But it’s embarrassing. At home, if anyone walks in the room and I’m watching Friends, that’s a horrible look, I think, don’t you?”
Perry, who played Chandler Bing on Friends, died in October 2023 at age 54. His former co-stars paid tribute to the actor in a joint statement at the time, calling his passing an “unfathomable loss.”
Kudrow later shared her own, solo tribute to Perry. “Thank you for making me laugh so hard at something you said, that my muscles ached, and tears poured down my face EVERY DAY,” she wrote on Instagram.
Acknowledging Perry’s substance use, which he wrote about in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, she added, “Thank you for showing up at work when you weren’t well and then, being completely brilliant.”
Kudrow Used To Avoid Friends
While Kudrow now enjoys revisiting the hit sitcom, in the past, she actively avoided any Friends reruns. “I don’t watch it if it’s on,” she told Entertainment Tonight in 2019. “I might not like myself [on the show], so I’d rather not risk that.”
