FRIENDS star Lisa Kudrow has made a heart-breaking confession and said “nobody cared about me”.
Lisa, 62, is currently reprising her role of the desperate yet endearing Valerie Cherish in The Comeback its final season.
Lisa felt that during her time on Friends with co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, the late Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer that she was forgotten about it.
In an interview, she told the Independent: “Nobody cared about me.
“There were certain parts of (my talent agency) that just referred to me as the sixth Friend.”
Several of her co-stars later secured choice film roles, after the show’s success but Lisa thought the same kinds of deals eluded her.
She explained: “There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have.
“There was just, like, Boy, is she lucky she got on that show.”
However, Lisa has since found success beyond Friends, including on her HBO series The Comeback.
Lisa, who co-created the series, was joined by her co-creator, Michael Patrick King, for the interview ahead of its third season.
He was surprised to learn that she did not have huge offers amid the success of Friends, and pointed out that she was also the first member of the cast to win an Emmy, which she received for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1998.
According to Lisa, it was only when she starred as the wife of a psychiatrist treating a mob boss in the 1999 comedy Analyze This, which starred Robert De Niro that she began to get better offers.
She explained: “That’s when the agents and business people started circling, wanting to put me in romantic comedies and things.”
But Lisa knew that strategy wouldn’t work because she thought she wasn’t “adorable” enough.
Lisa also had a theory that she had been harmed by reports that she had taken the lead role in getting her co-stars to collectively bargain when they renegotiated their contracts ahead of season three.
This led them to make equal, increasing salaries for each subsequent season, with a major jump from $125,000 per episode to $750,000 per episode in seasons seven and eight.
By seasons nine and ten, each actor was making an astounding $1 million per episode, a feat that has rarely been equaled reports The Daily Mail.
Lisa explained her talent agency was upset about rumours that she had taken the lead on the strategy, even though she denied being responsible.
She said: “I absolutely was not the ringleader, And that was reported, and it wasn’t true.
“My team were very angry about that. It was leaked sort of as a warning to other clients like, Don’t do something like that.”
Lisa currently stars on The Comeback as the B-list actress Valerie Cherish, who struggles to revive her career after falling out of favour in the industry.
The first season of the mockumentary aired in 2005, just a year after Friends ended, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade later, in 2014, that a second season was produced.
Now, twelve years later, the third and final season has returned with Valerie cast on the world’s first sitcom written by AI.
The Comeback is available on HBO Max
