The actress is imagining Phoebe's potential life with Mike Hannigan and their kids!
Lisa Kudrow is imagining what Phoebe Buffay would be up to today. In an interview with The Sunday Times, the 56-year-old actress looks back on her time on Friends and guesses how her character, Phoebe Buffay, and her onscreen husband, Mike Hannigan (Paul Rudd), would be spending their days in quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"I feel like if they’d had kids she would be militaristic about creating art," Kudrow says. "So their place would be overrun with huge, outlandish projects."
As for Kudrow herself, she's spending her days quarantining in Los Angeles with her husband, Michael Stern, and their 22-year-old son, Julian.
"We have fortunate circumstances here, though," she says. "I don’t have complaints. [Before the pandemic] I would spend weekends never leaving my house anyway, which to me was heaven."
Though Kudrow may have spent much of her pre-pandemic time at home, she did have one major thing that was postponed due to the health crisis -- a reunion with her Friends castmates Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer. Though the reunion won't happen when it was scheduled, Kudrow knows it'll be worth the wait.
"No audience has seen us together since the show was over," she says. "We will reminisce, talk about what was going on behind the scenes. It’s not us playing our characters. It’s not an episode. It’s not scripted. It’s six of us coming together for the first time in I don’t know how long."
"I am really looking forward to it, because I think that I remember things, but then I talk to Matt [LeBlanc] or Jennifer, and they remember everything," Kudrow continues. "It’s really fun."
The reunion is such an exciting event because, for Kudrow, "Friends has been nothing but good."
"I don’t see a reality where Friends was anything but good," she says. "... It’s very hard to stake your claim in this business. So anything that puts you in a spotlight where people pay attention is an opportunity."
Despite her positive memories of starring on the iconic sitcom, Kudrow admits that the show would "be completely different" if it was made today.
"It would not be an all-white cast, for sure. I’m not sure what else," she says. "But, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong. Also, this show thought it was very progressive. There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together? We had surrogacy too. It was, at the time, progressive."
As for the continued popularity of the series, Kudrow credits that to a sort of "unconscious nostalgia."
"Yes, it’s a fun comedy, but it’s also about people connecting, and part of what appeals about it now is that young people have this unconscious nostalgia for personal connection," she says. "And not just right now during the pandemic, but before that."
Watch the video below to see what one of Kudrow's Friends co-stars is doing in quarantine.
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