Lisa Kudrow wasn’t always a big fan of having a live studio audience during Friends tapings.
In a recent episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the host brought up something Jennifer Aniston said to him—that Kudrow didn’t like it when the audience laughed at things she said.
“Because they were laughing for too long. It wasn’t that funny. That’s why,” she told O’Brien. “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. Sometimes I would just look out if they’d been laughing too long, and go, ‘Come on’. Really angry.”
“A TV show is not for the studio audience,” the actress continued. “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.”
She explained that filming a single 30-minute Friends episode would often take six to eight hours because the production would go through “so many takes.” That had a ripple effect; after a while, the audience would “stop laughing” and then the writers would think the material wasn’t funny, leading to multiple rewrites and even more takes.
“But it worked the first time!” Kudrow said. “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.”
The 60-year-old starred in Friends as Phoebe Buffay during the show’s 10 seasons, from 1994 to 2004. She has been nominated six times for an Emmy for the role, winning one for best supporting actress in a comedy series, per Variety.