Lisa Kudrow: Why the Friends and Time Bandits star is always underestimated.

If you were one of the nearly 22 million people who watched the premiere of Friends on Sept. 22, 1994, you knew pretty quickly which characters were meant to break out. “People feel excited to see what she’s going to make because she doesn’t need to work,” Olivia Wilde, who cast Kudrow as a mom in Booksmart, recently told the New York Times. “So when she makes something it feels like she chooses only the most interesting things.” Kudrow’s latest interesting thing is Time Bandits, the Apple TV+ series created by Taika Waititi, Iain Morris, and Jemaine Clement, and it’s an utter delight to see her unique comic sensibility on a TV screen again. It seems likely to me that it was The Opposite of Sex that convinced David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the creators of Friends, that there was more to Kudrow than “Smelly Cat.” In the series’ fourth and fifth seasons, Kudrow’s real-life pregnancy was written into the show, as Phoebe agreed to be a surrogate for her doofus brother Frank and his wife. As Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom star whose attempted return to fame is chronicled by a “reality” crew, Kudrow puts on an incredible show as a woman who’s always trying to put on a show.