Lisa Kudrow Reveals What ‘Irritated’ Her Most About Filming ‘Friends’

Lisa Kudrow is not a fan of the multi-camera sitcom format. In a new interview on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, Kudrow said that the live studio audience “irritated” her at times while filming Friends. She said she now believes the live audience does more harm than good for the final product of the show.

O’Brien asked Kudrow about the experience of shooting in front of a live audience for all those years, and she said bluntly that she found it annoying. She said taht sometimes “they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny.” She believed that this had to do with the atmosphere, expectations and subtle instructions from the producers to make sure their laughter was audible. She said: “It wasn’t an honest response and it irritated me. Now you’re just ruining the timing of the rest of the show. There are other lines.”

Kudrow even said that she would sometimes address this frustration while filming. She said: “Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘Come on.’ Really angry.” She also said that she did her best to keep in mind the audience that would be watching at home, rather than just playing to the crowd in front of her.

“A TV show is not for the studio audience,” she explained. “It is made for the TV viewers at home. That’s who we are in service to. If it was a stage play, yeah, laugh as long as you want. I’ll figure out things to keep my character busy waiting to continue with it. That’s fine. It’s being filmed and now I’m just standing there… you do like nod, ‘Yeah, I said that.’ It’s terrible. They instructed our audience not to do anything like that, I think.”

All this led Kudrow to a revelation that may surprise some Friends fans. While each episode of the series comes in at around 22 minutes, it took between six and eight hours to film each one. She said that much of that time came from repeating takes, fumbling lines and trying out different material, including improvised lines or tweaks to the dialogue made on the fly. By the end of this process, she said the audience would sometimes “stop laughing” at jokes they’d heard over and over again, changing the dynamic in the room and requiring some to force disingenuous laughter.

“But it worked the first time!” She recalled, frustrated. “All I knew is you’re going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is. Who is suffering because they’re not laughing? I am okay if they aren’t laughing as hard. We can keep going.”

Kudrow’s full interview with O’Brien is available now on most major podcast platforms. Friends is streaming now on Max. A new Blu-ray box set will be released in September, marking the 30th anniversary of this iconic series.