For Friends fans, it’s impossible to imagine any other actress in place of Lisa Kudrow to play the role of Phoebe Buffay. Although the actress in a recent interview on the Jess Cagle Podcast With Julia Cunnigham opened up about how it wasn’t an easy task for her to bag Buffay’s role and that she even had to do an extra audition for the same.
Kudrow who starred as Phoebe Buffay for all ten seasons of the show had to prove to director Jim Burrows that she was perfect for the part mainly because she was removed from his previous show. The actress was first fired from Burrows’ famed series Frasier where she said she was “mistakenly cast” at the time. Speaking about Burrows’ thoughts on her starring as Phoebe, she said, “I knew that Jim clocked that I was wrong from the table read and so I thought, ‘Oh he doesn’t like me or what I do.'”
She admitted that she was asked to do a special audition for Burrows which she found out later was not the case for the rest of the cast members. She said, “I thought maybe everyone had to do it, but I found out a few years ago that I was the only one. Just to make sure that it was all OK with Jimmy that I played Phoebe.”
Although the Friends star admitted that eventually Burrows and her earned each other’s trust. Kudrow’s Friends role earned her six Emmy nominations for playing Phoebe Buffay and she also bagged the supporting actress in a comedy series Emmy for her role as Phoebe in the show’s fourth season.
