Friends star Lisa Kudrow has shared that she would often compare herself physically to Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox when they worked together on the hit sitcom.
In a new interview with the podcast Podcrushed, the Phoebe Buffay actor spoke about how seeing herself on screen next to her former co-stars led to her feeling self-conscious.
Asked about past “body image issues” during her time on Friends, Lisa explained: “It was just seeing myself on the show and seeing myself in clothes, and seeing Courteney and Jennifer in clothes.
“I thought, ‘Oh, they know tailoring so they can discuss it with the costume designer about where exactly to take something in’.
“And then I’d ask one of them, ‘can you come with me on my fitting’, and they would, because honestly… it was like sisters, you know? And they’d come in, like, ‘you’ve got to take it in here and take it in there, and do that’.
“And that’s when I would see, ‘OK, it’s not just about tailoring’.”
She added: “And I’m not trying to say I was overweight, either, by the way. Because I was not. But I just had no idea [about] the shape of my actual body.”
Lisa went on to say that in her “late 30s or 40s”, she began embracing the way she looked.
“I just realised, ‘oh no, it’s OK, this is just what I look like and that’s OK’,” she said. “That’s all in your own head, you’re doing that to yourself. No one needs you to be Tom Cruise or as famous as Tom Cruise.
“For me, at that time, it was Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan. No one is actually requiring that of me.”
In a 2019 interview with Marc Maron, Lisa spoke about how she felt like a “mountain of a girl” when watching herself back on Friends.
“I’m already bigger than Courteney and Jennifer,” she told the presenter at the time.
“[I was] taller, bigger. My bones feel bigger, I just felt like this mountain of a woman next to them.”
Lisa recently revealed that her teenage son is now discovering Friends for the first time, although she admitted she found herself wanting to tell him “fuck you” after one particular comment.