Lisa Kudrow, who is also known as the iconic Phoebe Buffay, recently announced in an interview that she almost "quit" Friends after the show's third season.
Read on to find out why...
Now, Friends is arguably one of the most successful sitcoms of all time.
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We were introduced to the Friends gang back in 1994, when Ross (David Schwimmer), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Chandler (Matthew Perry), Monica, (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) first burst onto our screens.Of course, it was an instant hit...
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Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the comedy follows the friends, who live in the same New York apartment block, as they together navigate through the turbulent years of their late twenties.And we grew to become incredibly attached to these characters...
The show truly made us feel like a member of the Friends gang, even when we were conflicted over whether Ross and Rachel really were on a break or not... FYI they totally were on a break.The final episode aired in September 2004...
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And we watched through our tears as the gang said their final goodbyes to the apartment we had all grown to know and love for the past decade.It was an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least.
Monica and Chandler were starting a family, Phoebe was newly married, Rachel had a new job in Paris... As with a lot of friendships, the gang had grown apart and were embarking upon their separate journeys.Oh, and Rachel got off the plane!
Fans rejoiced as Ross and Rachel finally put their differences aside and got back together.But, fifteen years on from Rachel getting off the plane...
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We have never found out what happened to the gang. Did Rachel and Ross stay together? Would Monica and Chandler ever get divorced? Did Joey ever make it as a big actor?Over the years, there have been a few low-key reunions and a lot of false hope...
Apart from the occasional reunion on talk-shows, fans have had their fair share of disappointments when it comes to waiting for a Friends reunion.Even the cast has confirmed in the past that a reunion is incredibly unlikely...
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Matt Le Blanc left fans heartbroken last year as he rejected calls for the show to return, saying the sitcom simply "wouldn’t be the same" in an interview with the Mail Online. He added, "People want to know what happened to them. But it was about a finite period in a person’s life after college, before you settle down and start a family."So, yeah... Things haven't been looking too great on the reunion front.
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Many worry that because Friends was about a group of people in their twenties and thirties, it just wouldn't work following the gang through their forties and fifties.Well, the news we were all waiting for arrived in February last year...
All of the cast posted the same throwback picture on Instagram confirming the news of an official reunion. Many fans hoped that the reunion would be scripted but sadly, the reunion will simply be a sit-down with the entire cast and crew to just catch up and reminisce on the good times. It still sounds brilliant, though!The reunion was originally scheduled to air in May 2020 on HBO Max...
Along with the channel releasing all 10 seasons of the sitcom for viewers to watch on-demand.But bad news wasn't far around the corner...
Due to the global pandemic, the Friends reunion was called off "indefinitely," just a week before filming was set to take place. A date is yet to be confirmed for the reunion, but not to worry guys! It's definitely going to happen at some point this year!So all we can do in the meantime is just watch all of the seasons on repeat, right?
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Every single episode is unbelievably rewatchable and even the cast members themselves enjoy reminiscing over those iconic 10 years.But in more recent times, Lisa Kudrow has opened up about something particularly difficult that happened during her time on the set of Friends.
Kudrow played the quirky yet street-wise Phoebe Buffay who is a firm fan-favorite in the show. Phoebe had a tragic backstory, losing her mom at a young age and spending time homeless as a teenager - but it's a testament to Kudrow's skill as a comedian and actor that audiences were always laughing with the character, and never at her.Kudrow recently appeared on an episode of the YouTube series, Hiking With Kevin...
And she explained that at one point, she very nearly quit the series... meaning we would have had a life without Phoebe Buffay!She explained that she started to feel "burned out" after the show's third season.
She explained that the character was a type that she really hadn't played before, and felt like she "tricked" the Friends producers into casting her.
"At the audition, I was the only one who could cope with the audition process and that's how I got it, I think. So I had to work hard at being Phoebe."
After 3 seasons of working hard to play the character, she was starting to get sick of it and contemplated quitting...
But co-star Matt LeBlanc talked her out of it.
"I said, 'I can't, I don't think I have it, I mean, I don't know what I'm doing. And he went, 'You're her, relax, you got it. You've been doing this f***ing character for 3 years. You're working too hard. That's your problem. You don't need to work this hard. Relax.' And he was right."