00:00Friends gave me everything.
00:04It just did. And I loved being Phoebe. I loved the whole experience.
00:09From CBS Sunday Morning to Vanity Fair, Lisa Kudra has had mostly only nice things
00:15to say about her time on Friends.
00:17I'm sorry I love Phoebe. They're good writers. So if you're a good writer,
00:21there are no problems. That is really funny. That was a funny show.
00:25That is, until now. In a new interview with The Times of London,
00:29the actress is exposing the mean and brutal behavior by the mostly male writers of the
00:34beloved NBC sitcom. The must-see TV hit ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004.
00:41There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes.
00:44Don't forget we were recording in front of a live audience of 400,
00:48and if you messed up one of these writers' lines or didn't get the perfect response,
00:52they could be like, can't the bitch f***ing read? She's not even trying. She f***ed up my line.
00:57Kudra claimed that in the writers' room, the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies
01:02about her co-stars, Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox. She called it intense and claims the dynamic
01:09between the writers and actors could be brutal. It's not unlike the picture painted by Patti
01:14Lynn in her 2023 tell-all book, End Credits, How I Broke Up with Hollywood. Lynn was a staff writer
01:20for
01:20one season on Friends. She claimed the writers' room was fraught with pervasive sex talk. She called the
01:26other writers clicky, like the preppy rich kids who shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch and drove brand new
01:31convertibles. At the time, around 2000, she was the only minority writer out of 14. Only five were women.
01:38Lynn called the whole experience a major mind f***ing. As for Kudra, who plays a fictional sitcom
01:44star in HBO's The Comeback, other recent comments of hers have raised eyebrows. She told the UK
01:50newspaper The Independent that nobody cared about her when she was on Friends and that her talent
01:55agency just referred to me as the sixth friend. Then in a sit-down with fellow comedy legend Lily
02:01Tomlin for Interview Magazine, Kudra implied that modern-day sitcoms are dying.
02:06I think we need to get back to being able to tell jokes. I feel like we've been too afraid
02:10to make
02:10jokes that might make people uncomfortable. The really good ones, they're not tame jokes. They're
02:16jokes that kind of, I can't believe you just said that. Comedy is about surprise. You need things you
02:21didn't see coming. One thing's for sure, the money ain't the same. Kudra also revealed to the Times of
02:27London that 20 years after Friends ended, she and her fellow co-stars still earn a staggering amount in
02:33residuals. Wait for it, 20 million dollars every year. That'll pay for a lot of cups of coffee at Central
02:40Perk.
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