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Life after ‘Friends’
Her hairstyle didn’t spawn a thousand imitations; she didn’t spark fashion trends. Her private life was never the subject of feverish speculation. But everybody liked Phoebe - almost as much as they disliked Ross. Lisa Kudrow’s Friends character was irresistible: the quirkiest of the gang, but also the warmest. Phoebe was actually the Friend we knew least about, though. Who knew, for example, that Kudrow married one Michael Stern, an advertising executive, in 1995? And as loved as she was for her off-the-wall, sometimes cruel humour, and her sublime renditions of Smelly cat, no one really expected Kudrow to emerge triumphant when Central Perk finally shut up shop.
Yet that is exactly what she has done. Jennifer Aniston tried to leap straight into the Hollywood big league with films such as Derailed and Rumor has it - but only graces magazine covers when her personal life is in meltdown. Matt LeBlanc sought in vain to extend the life of his Friends character in the ill-fated spin-off, Joey. Aside from a stage appearance by David Schwimmer in London and a guest role from Matthew Perry in The west wing, Ross and Chandler are keeping a low profile.
Kudrow, though, has chosen her post-Friends roles assiduously, and her caution has paid dividends. Indeed, even when Friends was in production, she opted for other projects that took her far from Phoebe territory and garnered credibility that Matthew-The-Whole-Nine-Yards-Perry could only dream of. No one who saw Kudrow in The Opposite of Sex — playing Lucia, a bitter, complicated, disappointed woman — could fail to be convinced that there was more to Kudrow than fluffy cuteness.
Her taste for the left-field shines through in her latest project, Happy Endings. In it, Kudrow’s character sleeps with her stepbrother - who later turns out to be gay - gets pregnant and has an abortion. Only she doesn’t have an abortion: instead she secretly has the baby adopted. Later, she becomes a neurotic abortion clinic counsellor, and has a dysfunctional relationship with a Mexican masseur. Then, twenty-odd years later, a curious young man turns up in her life ...
“It’s hard to describe,” says Kudrow, with characteristic understatement. “But it’s easy to follow.” Kudrow is in London to talk Happy Endings - but it is hard to avoid Friends. The merchandise is gone from shops, stories of the actors’ pay-rises are distant memories, and the frenzy over the show seems quaintly old-fashioned, but even now, it still feels as if you are never more than an hour away from a Friends repeat on E4. The fact is that Friends – with the passage of years only marked by the casts’ hairstyles, and Perry’s fluctuating circumference — was a true classic that will be around in perpetuity. Kudrow only has good things to say about the show and her fellow Friends.
Kudrow exhibits little of Phoebe’s ditziness. She talks in measured tones about morality and politics, and, as a mother, she says, she has a sense of perspective on her work, on ‘the business’ the rest of us call show business
“It was the best experience, an unusually good one on TV. We all got along. The producers were great. It was wonderful being involved. I was extraordinarily lucky.” She wrinkles her nose at the mention of any kind of reunion, but says she would like to get back on to TV. “I think I will have to wait a while, though. I think, on network TV, I’m still Phoebe to people and it would be hard to convince them otherwise in the bright lights of a sitcom.” Is that frustrating? “Not at all. It’s fair. I’ll accept being Phoebe to people for a while longer, given how much fun it was. That’s totally fair.”
She went some way towards exorcising the spectre of Phoebe with The Comeback, a comedy-drama for cable channel HBO that was broadcast in the UK on LivingTV. Focusing on the comeback of Valerie Cherish, an insecure, desperate sitcom actor played by Kudrow, it was a scathing, often excruciating critique of US TV, from — as Kudrow puts it — “the brutality and ruthlessness of the networks” to the coarseness of reality TV. As part of her return to TV, Cherish was cast in a cheesy sitcom while being filmed for a reality show to accompany the comedy.
Kudrow exhibits little of Phoebe’s ditziness. She talks in measured tones about morality and politics, and, as a mother, she says, she has a sense of perspective on her work, on “the business” the rest of us call show business. She is, you quickly realise, a proper grown-up, leagues away from Valerie Cherish-ish vanity and insecurity. Indeed, Kudrow says, her life couldn’t be better. How’s that for a happy ending?
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