Lisa Kudrow recently revealed to The Times of London that she faced some harsh treatment from the predominantly male writing staff of “Friends” during her decade-long tenure on the NBC show. Kudrow, who played the quirky Phoebe Buffay, mentioned that the writers would criticize the cast for forgetting their lines and would often spend their downtime discussing her female co-stars.
“There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes,” Kudrow noted. “Don’t forget we were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response they could be like, ‘Can’t the bitch fucking read? She’s not even trying. She fucked up my line.'”
She also mentioned that in the writers’ room, “the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer [Aniston] and Courteney [Cox]. It was intense.”
Kudrow characterized the treatment by the writers as “brutal,” although she said she largely ignored it since much of their inappropriate behavior occurred privately.
“Oh, it could be brutal, but these guys — and it was mostly men in there — were sitting up until 3 a.m. trying to write the show so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter,’ ” she explained.
The conduct of the “Friends” writing team had been publicly brought to light by Amaani Lyle in the early 2000s. Lyle, who worked on the show in 1999 during Season 6, filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. Television over the writers’ room behavior. In her suit, she alleged that the writers frequently made sexual and racist comments, and as the writers’ assistant, she was obligated to document everything said in the room. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which ruled against Lyle, determining that the crass nature of the environment was essential to the work.
