‘Friends’ star Lisa Kudrow turns 60: What fans didn’t see on hit show

Lisa Kudrow is celebrating her 60th birthday!

The actress is best known for portraying Phoebe Buffay for 10 seasons on the hit NBC sitcom “Friends.” She appeared on the show alongside co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry and Courteney Cox.

Although the show went off the air almost 20 years ago, it remains as popular as ever, as it continues to find new audiences through its presence on various streaming networks.

Here are some behind-the-scenes tidbits from one of the most popular shows of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Iconic mistake

One of the show’s most memorable moments came in the season four finale when Ross mistakenly says Rachel’s name at the altar instead of his bride Emily’s. Turns out, the storyline was inspired by a real-life mistake made while filming a scene earlier in the season.

In the 2019 book, “Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era,” Saul Austerlitz interviewed the show’s creators, writers, producers and some of the cast. The book contained many behind-the-scenes secrets from the set, one of them being how the writers came up with the idea for the name mix-up.

According to Austerlitz, the writers knew they wanted Ross and Emily to go through with the wedding, but they weren’t sure how exactly the episode was going to end. When filming another scene earlier in the season, David Schwimmer, who played Ross on the show, was meant to say “Emily, the taxi’s here,” but said “Rachel, the taxi’s here” instead.

Austerlitz wrote it was “at this moment” when one of the producers, Greg Malins, and one of the creators, David Crane, turned to each other and decided that is how the season would end.

Injured star

During Max’s 2021 special “Friends: The Reunion,” the cast and creators of the show discussed how filming a stunt during a particular episode ended with one of the main castmembers injured.

The memorable season three episode, “The One Where No One’s Ready,” features a running bit in which Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry’s respective characters, Joey and Chandler, are fighting over who gets to sit in a specific chair. At one point in the episode, both Chandler and Joey run towards the chair, jumping onto it while calling dibs, which is when things went south for LeBlanc.

“I went just to jump over the coffee table and somehow tripped, and my legs went up in the air and my shoulder came out of the socket,” LeBlanc told his castmates during the reunion. The cast later watched footage of the incident, in which LeBlanc can be seen landing on the armchair at a strange angle and walking off, very clearly in pain.

According to the cast, paramedics were then called onto set and production on that specific episode was shut down. Turns out, LeBlanc had dislocated his shoulder and had to wear a sling, something which was written into the show, explained away by saying Joey fell off the bed.

Ursula

Prior to landing the role of Phoebe Buffay on “Friends,” Lisa Kudrow played the character of Ursula on another popular NBC sitcom, “Mad About You.” Ursula was the rude waitress who worked at the restaurant the main characters Paul and Jamie often frequented. Since both shows took place in New York and aired on NBC, the “Friends” writers wrote Ursula into the show.

“My husband Jeffrey [Klarik] was on “Mad About You” as a writer. We had to go to [creators] Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser to get their permission, and amazingly because of that relationship… they were incredibly generous and let us do it, which is nuts,” creator David Crane told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “I wouldn’t let anybody do that with a character on our show!”

Filming the scenes involved using a stand-in for Kudrow to act across, which ended up being the actress’ sister.

“I think feeling the [stress] she put her sister into by being the double was more in her head at the time, so those scenes were a little bit tricky to shoot,” executive producer Kevin S. Bright explained. “But it ended up being a lot of fun when you put it together.”

The Rachel

At the end of season one, Jennifer Aniston debuted “The Rachel,” which would go on to become one of the most talked about hairstyles in the history of television. She continued to sport the haircut throughout the show’s second season, but Aniston wasn’t a fan of the style.

Aniston has spoken out about how much she disliked the haircut on more than a few occasions.

“I love Chris, and he’s the bane of my existence at the same time because he started that damn Rachel, which was not my best look,” she told Allure in 2011. “How do I say this? I think it was the ugliest haircut I’ve ever seen.”