It’s not super common to have a sitcom with six main characters of equal billing, but that’s how Friends operated for its 10 seasons — with the cast ensuring their parity by sticking together during salary negotiations. Still, every fan has an opinion about who was their favorite and which Friend was the worst. You better believe Hollywood executives did too, and Lisa Kudrow got real about people seeing her as Friends’ least popular cast member also known as the “sixth Friend.”
Phoebe Buffay was a beloved member of the Friends ensemble, irreplaceable with her consistently off-beat humor. However, it seems that people in Hollywood didn’t value her as much as they did, say, Jennifer Aniston or Courteney Cox. Lisa Kudrow was asked about representatives referring to her internally as the “sixth Friend,” and she told THR:
That was what the talk among the business folk was. But I really didn’t care because it didn’t matter. I did a movie right after the first season, an Albert Brooks movie. Yay! And then the next season, I did two movies: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Clockwatchers. I just thought it doesn’t matter, does it, what anyone thinks? I have to do what I do.
It seems like even as executives were pessimistic about Lisa Kudrow’s career outside of Friends, she was proving them wrong in real time. In 1995 she had a role in Mother, which Albert Brooks wrote, directed and starred in, and in 1997 she did the cult classic Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion with Mira Sorvino and Clockwatchers, as well as several other projects during Friends’ run.
I can definitely see how Lisa Kudrow and her character on Friends might not have gotten the respect they deserved. The sitcom — one of the greatest sitcoms of all time — centered a lot of its stories around Ross and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer). Chandler (Matthew Perry) brought the laughs and Monica (Courteney Cox) was kind of the glue that held them all together.
However, Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Phoebe started out as having less depth than their counterparts, making jokes about food or injecting weird and whimsical observations. Lisa Kudrow worked hard to develop her character and put a lot of thought into details like making Phoebe bad at guitar, which resulted in someone Kudrow was proud of. She even became emotional watching Phoebe’s arc as she rewatched Friends in recent years.
Even post-Friends I’d have to say those executives were wrong, because Lisa Kudrow has had plenty of success over the past two-plus decades, most recently with the third season of The Comeback (streaming with an HBO Max subscription), which got meta with a great Friends reference, as well as starring in No Good Deeds and Time Bandits.
It’s unfortunate that business executives underestimated Lisa Kudrow enough back in the day to refer to her as the “sixth Friend.” However, I love that she didn’t let it stop her and let her work speak for itself.
