“Friends” last aired a new episode in May 2004. The cast has not filmed together in over two decades. And yet, according to Lisa Kudrow, the checks have never stopped coming.
In a candid interview with The Times of London, the 62-year-old actress revealed that she and her former castmates continue to collect $20 million per year in residuals from the show — a figure that reflects just how thoroughly the NBC sitcom has embedded itself into the global streaming and syndication landscape in the years since it ended.
“Because Phoebe Buffay was so great?” Kudrow joked when asked why the number remains so high, nodding to her beloved character from the series.
The show debuted in September 1994 and was an immediate phenomenon, drawing 25 million viewers per week at the height of its popularity. When the finale aired in May 2004, it was watched by more than 52 million people — one of the most-watched television events in American history.
She Never Watched It — Until Now
For all the success “Friends” generated, Kudrow admitted to something that will likely surprise a lot of those 52 million finale viewers: she had never actually sat down and watched the show herself — not until grief gave her a reason to.
When Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing, died in October 2023, Kudrow decided it was finally time.
“Before, I only saw what I did wrong or could have done better,” she explained to The Times. “But for the first time I truly appreciated just how great it was.”
What she found when she finally allowed herself to watch without the filter of self-criticism was something she clearly had not anticipated — a full accounting of the talent that surrounded her.
“I felt I did OK, but Jennifer and Courteney? Amazing. David and Matt? They had me laughing so hard. And then Matthew — he was just beyond us all.”
Remembering Matthew Perry
Kudrow’s grief for Perry has been a recurring theme in her public appearances since his death — and the specificity with which she describes him says more than any general tribute could.
In a June 2024 conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, she explained that watching Perry on screen had become a way of “just celebrating how hilarious he was” — preserving, in the most concrete way available, the memory of someone she described as “uniquely hilarious.”
“That is what I want to remember about him,” she said.
She described what it was like to be around him during filming — the energy, the relentlessness of the humor.
“You’re just laughing all day long, basically, in between the scenes, because these are funny people. And especially someone like Matthew, whose goal was: How many laughs can I get in real life every day? So we were always laughing so hard, tears were flying out of our faces.”
What the Show Got Right — and What Happened Off Camera
Kudrow also reflected on why “Friends” continues to resonate across generations — and offered a theory about its enduring cultural appeal.
She suggested the show “captured a kind of innocence” that a younger generation, shaped by smartphones and social media from childhood, has never been able to experience firsthand. The world the six friends inhabited in that Manhattan apartment — one of genuine face-to-face presence, of unmediated connection — looks like something qualitatively different from the present.
But Kudrow was quick to complicate any idealized reading of what life on that set was actually like.
She described the pressure of performing in front of a live studio audience of 400 people — and the very specific cruelty that could follow a misstep.
“If you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response they could be like, ‘Can’t the b—- f—ing read? She’s not even trying. She f—ed up my line,'” Kudrow recalled. “And we know that back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense.”
The comments represent some of the most candid public remarks Kudrow has made about the environment behind a show that, to its audience, always looked effortless.
Lisa Kudrow has been Phoebe Buffay for three decades — and the royalties that role continues to generate suggest the world has no intention of letting her be anything else. But the interview she gave to The Times of London reveals someone considerably more complicated than the cheerful, eccentric character she played: a performer who spent years unable to watch her own work without wincing, who finally sat down with it only because the person she called the greatest among them was gone, and who has been carrying the grief and the laughter of those ten seasons ever since. The $20 million a year is remarkable. The memory of Matthew Perry laughing until tears flew is something else entirely.