Los Angeles, March 27 – Hollywood actress Lisa Kudrow is reflecting on the past. The actress has shared that she still feels "a little emotional" when remembering how her iconic sitcom ‘Friends’ provided comfort to people after 9/11.
The actress, who played the role of Phoebe Buffay in the sitcom, realized that the series offered people a sense of escape following the horrific terrorist attacks on the United States, which claimed the lives of 2,977 victims, according to ‘Female First UK’.
She told ‘Vanity Fair’, “After 9/11, I realized how important entertainment really is, and how important comedies are, and how important ‘Friends’ was to people because we all need that escape”.
The actress, who portrayed the quirky and optimistic singer-songwriter and masseuse in all 10 seasons of ‘Friends’, recalled emotional encounters with fans after the events of September 11.
Lisa, 62, said, “I would drive home from the set, from ‘Friends’, and people would stop you at a traffic light, and someone in the car next to you would look over and say, ‘Ahh’. After 9/11, it still gets me a little emotional. Someone would look over and just say, ‘Thank you’, like they were about to cry, and just say, ‘Thank you’. And I fully understood what they meant”.
This experience showed her just how much entertainment can impact people.
Lisa added, “That’s when I really understood what these shows mean to us. And I felt very proud to be contributing to that”.
According to ‘Female First UK’, she realized that ‘Friends’, which ran from 1994 until 2004, was providing people with a "mental health service". But for Lisa, it was the sitcom ‘Will and Grace’ that provided her comfort in the aftermath of 9/11.
In 2023, she told ‘People’ magazine, “After 9/11, all I was doing was watching the news, and every single thing I saw was about someone who knew someone who was in one of the towers or something like that. I started watching ‘Will + Grace’, and I thought, ‘Oh, okay. Oh, I wonder, they’re in New York. Oh God, they’re in New York. I wonder who they knew in the buildings, if they knew anyone’. Then I thought, ‘Oh, no, wait, no, because they would have shot this before 9/11. You work in that TV industry, you know. Don’t be an idiot’. Then I thought, ‘No, no. This is fiction. In this world, it didn’t even happen’”.
“I just needed that escape, and I was so grateful that there was something to watch where 9/11 hadn’t happened. It was the escape that I really needed,” she added.