Lisa Kudrow has opened up on how it took a couple of years to settle into her Friends character Phoebe Buffay.
The actor made the revelation while in conversation with Ted Danson on his podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name.
The pair were talking about developing their iconic characters that propelled them to fame. In the case of Danson, it was his star-making role as bartender Sam Malone on the sitcom Cheers.
"It took me if not a year and a half, maybe two seasons before I felt like I had Phoebe down," Kudrow said on Wednesday's episode. "The things she said were so outrageously illogical in order for me to justify them."
"I felt like it just took a lot of work to figure her out."
Kudrow explained how she would question the character's mindset and whether the dialogue written for her "was a good idea or a reasonable thing to say something."
"It was acting work, but it is like a puzzle to make it look real," she said.
"I think it was the second season or third season and I thought 'something's wrong because I'm not doing the work I was doing, I'm slacking off, I'm being lazy.'
"And I was getting really mad at myself, and [co-star Matt] LeBlanc came over and he said 'what's going on with you?'"
Kudrow explained how LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani on the show, spoke some sense into her by saying she was doing good work and it felt more effortless because "you know who the character is now, you don't need to do the work."
"And that was enough. It was sort of like someone shook me because I was getting hysterical. I wasn't literally getting hysterical," she said.
Kudrow was cast in the role in 1994 and played Phoebe for Friends' entire 10-season run.
But she learned recently that she was the only one of the six main cast to audition for her role.
"When we shot the reunion for Friends, or something else, like a Jim Burrows celebration, where I learned that I was the only cast member from Friends that had to audition for Jimmy Burrows, because I had just gotten fired from Frasier," she told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on their Smartless podcast on Tuesday.
Kudrow was nominated for six Emmy awards while playing Phoebe, and won for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1998.
Friends' finale drew 52.5 million viewers when in 2004 and remains the one of the most-watched TV shows of all-time. In 2023 alone, Friends was streamed for 25 billion minutes, according to HBO Max.
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