Lisa Kudrow is looking back at her time on the set of Friends and calling out some of the toxic masculine behavior from the writing team, which was “mostly men.”
Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on the NBC sitcom for 10 seasons, talked to The Times of London, where she opened up about the “mean stuff going on behind the scenes.”
“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 f*cking read? She’s not even trying. She f*cked up my line,’” Kudrow told the publication an interview posted on April 23.
She continued, “And we know that back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer [Aniston] and Courteney [Cox]. It was intense.”
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Kudrow noted that “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.’”
In 1999, Amaani Lyle, who was a writers assistant on the comedy series, sued three male writers for sexual harassment. She claimed she had to listen to the writers discuss fantasies about Aniston and Cox. Lyle ultimately lost the case as the court ruled that the speech was not directed at her and was part of the writing process.