Lisa Kudrow has confessed that being fired from Frasier was “devastating” and led her to fear she was “desperate” in her now iconic role as Phoebe Buffay on Friends.
The 61-year-old actress was cast as producer Roz Doyle in 1993 alongside Kelsey Grammer in the lead role, but was fired before the pilot episode was filmed and replaced by Peri Gilpin.
Lisa has now admitted that losing such an important job was a huge setback and told the Without intelligence Podcast about how director James Burrows, with whom he would later work on Friends, stopped the execution of a script to declare “this isn’t working.”
Lisa said: “I was trying to figure out what I could do, but I think they made a casting mistake because I went to the network with Perri Gilpin. I think they were just correcting a mistake, because Perri was always supposed to be Roz.”
However, the firing led Lisa on a new path that helped her land the life-changing role on Friends after appearing in a small part on the comedy series Mad About You.
Lisa Kudrow, 61, has revealed that being fired from Frasier was “devastating” and left her fearing she was “useless” in her now iconic role as Phoebe Buffay on Friends.
The actress was cast as producer Roz Doyle in the 1993 comedy alongside Kelsey Grammer (pictured) in the lead role.
Lisa was fired before the pilot episode was filmed and replaced by Peri Gilpin (Lisa appears on Friends).
She explained: ‘I guest starred on Mad About You, they rehired me, I had already guest starred on the first season.’
‘Now I’m there to play a different character (simply called ‘waitress’) and my agent said, ‘You’re not going to do this.’ I wasn’t in a position to say no. For me, it’s the best show and I’m going to do it.’
She was then invited back for five more episodes and declared, “Here’s my rental for the year,” and luck was on her side because the show’s writer and producer, Jeffrey Klarik, later suggested Lisa for the role of Phoebe Buffay when his partner David Crane was assembling the cast of Friends.
Lisa ended up meeting her former Frasier director, James Burrows, again when she had to audition him for her role on Friends and came away worried that she would be “useless”, but she was cast anyway and the role changed her life completely.
She won an Emmy for Best Actress for the role she played from 1994 to 2004, and along with her co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, would earn a whopping $1 million per episode in the later seasons of the hit sitcom.
This comes after Lisa admitted she is still haunted by the laughter of the studio audience while filming Friends, two decades after the series aired its final episode.
While appearing on the podcast Conan O’Brien needs a friendThe actress explained why she didn’t like the sound of the live audience laughing at her jokes.
“(It irritated me) because they laughed for so long. It wasn’t that funny,” he explained to O’Brien. “That’s why. It wasn’t an honest answer and it irritated me.”
Lisa said: “I was trying to ask myself, ‘What can I do? ’ but I think they made a casting mistake because I went to the network with Perri Gilpin (pictured). I think they were just correcting a mistake.”
She won an Emmy for Best Actress for her role in Friends in 1998 (pictured)
Along with his co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry, he also earned a whopping $1 million per episode in the later seasons of the hit sitcom.
She continued: “It’s like, ‘Now you’re ruining the flow of the rest of the show.’ Sometimes, if they’d been laughing for too long, I’d turn to them and say, ‘Come on.’ Really pissed off.”
“It’s meant for the viewers at home. That’s who we serve,” she insisted. “If it was a play, yeah, laugh all you want! I’ll think of things to keep my character busy, waiting to get on with it, that’s fine. But of course, it’s being filmed and now I’m just kind of standing there.”
Kudrow said the noise made her do “things you hate,” like nodding her head as if to say, “That’s right! I said it!”
He went on to note that the show’s opening act would specifically advise the audience not to do “any of that.”
The mother of one, who is married to Michel Stern, said it would take “between six and eight hours” to film a half-hour episode of the beloved show.
This is the second time this month that Kudrow has spoken out about feeling frustrated by the live audience during her time on Friends.
Earlier this month, he said: Entertainment Tonight that it ‘irritated’ them when ‘they (the studio audience) laughed for too long’.
This comes after Lisa admitted she is still haunted by the laughter of the studio audience while filming Friends, two decades after the series aired its final episode.
“God bless them. They were so excited to be there that sometimes the laughter was longer than if they had laughed at anything else,” the Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion star said.
Lisa added: “I thought, ‘Okay, take it easy. It’s not that funny. And there’s more to say!'”
The clarification comes after Aniston stated that Kudrow “hated it when the audience laughed” while filming Friends during her interview on Variety’s Actors on Actors.
She was like, “I’m not done! It’s not that funny!”
