Lisa Kudrow, whose film Happy Endings opened this year's London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, talks to Gareth McLean about sex, the state of American TV and, yes, the possibility of Phoebe making a comeback
Her hairstyle didn't spawn a thousand imitations; she didn't spark fashion trends. Her private life was never the subject of feverish speculation. But everybody liked Phoebe - almost as much as they disliked Ross. Lisa Kudrow's Friends character was irresistible: the quirkiest of the gang, but also the warmest. Phoebe was actually the Friend we knew least about, though. Who knew, for example, that Kudrow married one Michael Stern, an advertising executive, in 1995? And as loved as she was for her off-the-wall, sometimes cruel humour, and her sublime renditions of Smelly Cat, no one really expected Kudrow to emerge triumphant when Central Perk finally shut up shop.
Yet that is exactly what she has done. Jennifer Aniston tried to leap straight into the Hollywood big league with films such as Derailed and Rumour Has It - but graces magazine covers only when her personal life is in meltdown. Matt LeBlanc sought in vain to extend the life of his Friends character in the ill-fated spin-off, Joey. Aside from a stage appearance by David Schwimmer in London and a guest role from Matthew Perry in The West Wing, Ross and Chandler are keeping a low profile.
Kudrow, though, has chosen her post-Friends roles assiduously, and her caution has paid dividends. Indeed, even when Friends was in production, she opted for other projects that took her far from Phoebe territory and garnered credibility that Matthew The Whole Nine Yards Perry could only dream of. No one who saw Kudrow in The Opposite of Sex - playing Lucia, a bitter, complicated, disappointed woman - could fail to be convinced that there was more to Kudrow than fluffy cuteness.
Her taste for the left-field shines through in her latest project, Happy Endings, a film that opened the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last month. In it, Kudrow's character sleeps with her stepbrother - who later turns out to be gay - gets pregnant and has an abortion. Only she doesn't have an abortion: instead she secretly has the baby adopted. Later, she becomes a neurotic abortion clinic counsellor, and has a dysfunctional relationship with a Mexican masseur. Then, 20-odd years later, a curious young man turns up in her life . . . "It's hard to describe," says Kudrow, with characteristic understatement. "But it's easy to follow."
Kudrow is doing interviews to talk about Happy Endings - but it is hard to avoid Friends. The merchandise is gone from shops, the stories of the actors' pay rises are distant memories, and the frenzy over the show seems quaintly old-fashioned, but even now, it still feels as if you are never more than an hour away from a Friends repeat. The fact is that Friends - the passing of the years marked only by the casts' hairstyles, and Perry's fluctuating circumference - is a true classic that will be around in perpetuity.
Kudrow has only good things to say about the show and her fellow Friends.
"It was the best experience, an unusually good one in TV," she says. "We all got along. The producers were great. It was wonderful being involved. I was extraordinarily lucky."
She wrinkles her nose at the mention of any kind of reunion, but says she would like to get back on to TV. "I think I will have to wait a while, though. I think, on network TV, I'm still Phoebe to people and it would be hard to convince them otherwise in the bright lights of a sitcom."
Is that frustrating? "Not at all. It's fair. I'll accept being Phoebe to people for a while longer, given how much fun it was. That's totally fair."
SHE WENT SOME way towards exorcising the spectre of Phoebe with The Comeback, a comedy-drama for cable channel HBO that was broadcast in the UK on LivingTV. Focusing on the comeback of Valerie Cherish, an insecure, desperate sitcom actor played by Kudrow, it was a scathing, often excruciating critique of US TV, from, as Kudrow puts it, "the brutality and ruthlessness of the networks" to the coarseness of reality TV. As part of her return to TV, Cherish was cast in a cheesy sitcom while being filmed for a reality show to accompany the comedy.
The shows-within-the-show were perfect parodies, and The Comeback was a brilliant examination of the lengths people will go to for fame - and the depths to which TV will sink. It was also cancelled after 13 episodes. Kudrow is sanguine about that, but still incredulous at the state of US TV.
She says that since she started out, with bit parts on sitcoms such as Cheers, Newhart and Coach, and roles in schlocky delights such as In The Heat of Passion, she has seen TV become coarser and more obsessed with youth.
"I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country," she says. "I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that."
KUDROW SAYS SHE was drawn to Happy Endings, directed by Don Roos (with whom she worked on The Opposite of Sex in 1998), by the complexity of its characters. "I liked how human the people were, how flawed. They're not misunderstood or victims, they're just trying to survive in a complicated world."
As for her character in the film, Mamie, whose name belies a distinct dearth of maternal instinct, Kudrow says she's attracted to characters who "stuff things down, who keep things bottled up. It doesn't make them emotionally attractive, but it's interesting and real". Certainly, Mamie qualifies, initially at least, as emotionally unattractive. She's brittle, angry and lost, a woman who closed down her feelings and, two decades on, is still living with the consequences.
Despite dealing with such moral hot potatoes as abortion and homosexuality, Kudrow, perhaps disingenuously, doesn't see Happy Endings as a political film. "It deals with the most controversial issues, but that's not what the movie is about," she says. "They're part of the stories but they're not the story. The movie doesn't pick sides with the issue of abortion, for example. It says that reproduction is a serious business, that everything has consequences and you can't know how you would behave in a situation until you're in it."
This chimes with Kudrow's own views (famously, she was a virgin until she married): "We treat sex so casually and use it for everything but what it is - which is ultimately making another human being with thoughts and feelings and rights who will grow up to be an adult."
Kudrow describes herself as "pretty middle-of-the-road" politically. "There are some issues I'm more conservative on. As a parent, I'm concerned that there are so many young, young, young kids - like 12 years old - that are starting to have sex."
But she admits she finds the fact that the US is more conservative than it was 20 years ago and especially the banning of abortion by South Dakota as "scary".
Kudrow exhibits little of Phoebe's ditziness. She talks in measured tones about morality and politics, and, as a mother, she says, she has a sense of perspective on her work, on "the business" the rest of us call show business. She is, you quickly realise, a proper grown-up, leagues away from Valerie Cherish-ish vanity and insecurity. Indeed, Kudrow says, her life couldn't be better.
How's that for a happy ending?
Happy Endings is on DVD