“It took me, if not a year and a half, maybe two seasons, before I felt like I had Phoebe down,” explained Lisa Kudrow on the latest episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name, a podcast hosted by fellow sitcom stars Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson. And it wasn’t until Matt LeBlanc gave her a game-changing piece of advice that she was finally able to relax.
The Friends star continued, “The things she said were so outrageously illogical that in order for me to justify them, you know, I felt like, ‘oof.’ It just took a lot of work to figure out, ‘All right, how is it possible that I think this is true or a good idea or a reasonable thing to say?’”
“It’s like a puzzle,” Ted Danson said, and Kudrow agreed.
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“Yeah, to make it look real,” she said. “And so I think it’s second season or third season and I’m doing it and I’m like, ‘Something’s wrong.’ Because I’m not doing the work I was doing. I’m slacking off. I’m being lazy and I was getting really mad at myself.”
Luckily, her co-star LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani, was there to snap her out of it. As Kudrow explained:
“He said, ‘What’s going on with you?’ I said, ‘I’m being lazy. I’m not doing the work that I did first season, second season. I’m not doing the work I did for Phoebe, so it can’t be good,’ and he went, “No, you know who the character is now. You don’t need to do the work you did. You got it,’ and I went, ‘What? Oh.’”
“That was enough,” Kudrow said. “It’s sort of like someone shook me. Because I was getting hysterical. I wasn’t literally getting hysterical—you know, like if you're getting hysterical, someone slaps you back. Like, ‘Oh thanks. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I needed, yeah.’”
Danson could relate to the experience, as he himself didn’t feel like he was pulling off his Cheers role as Sam Malone until Season 2.
“I didn’t know how to play Sam Malone until about a year and a half in,” he told her. “Because I did not know what arrogance meant. I had never been to a bar. I did not pick women up. I was not a womanizer. Maybe I wanted to be, but I wasn’t.”
The key to getting over it for Danson was his realization that he couldn’t please everyone.
“It was only after about getting the feedback after a year and a half and realizing, ‘Oh, half the people like me, half the people hate me, so what the fuck? I’m gonna do this for myself,” Danson said. “‘I don’t care what you think. I’m gonna just keep doing what I’m doing,’ and that was when I began to learn how to play Sam.”
