Years after Friends, Lisa Kudrow says strangers still want an odd favor from her
Lisa Kudrow says Friends fans still hit her up for one oddly specific thing, years after the series ended — and it’s not the request you’re imagining.
Ask Lisa Kudrow for a photo and she might oblige. Ask her to sing “Smelly Cat” on the sidewalk, and the answer is still a hard no — a line she says she holds every time it comes up. She laid it out plainly during a new chat on Fresh Air with host Tonya Mosley.
“Sometimes people will stop me and say, ‘Oh, sing Smelly Cat’,” “I really don’t want to do that,”
The conversation stretched well beyond the famous Friends bit. Kudrow also talked about her Emmy-nominated final season of The Comeback and how she approached playing an actress willing to endure almost anything to stay relevant. She touched on a formative trip to Belarus and admitted she was a notably strait-laced teenager — the kind of personal detail that made the hour feel more like a candid catch-up than a nostalgia tour.
After Matthew Perry’s death
Kudrow said she returned to Friends following Matthew Perry’s passing, turning old episodes into a bedtime ritual. It was a genuine first-time watch in many ways: she’d long avoided seeing her own performances out of embarrassment, so whole stretches of the show — any scene without Phoebe — felt brand-new.
Some lines rang a bell, but mostly she found herself discovering the sitcom the way everyone else did decades ago. She said she was struck by how good her castmates were, and even reconnected with David Schwimmer after a Ross Geller joke needed smoothing over.
According to Kudrow, she’s not the only one with mixed feelings about revisiting the series; Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston have expressed similarly complicated relationships with rewatching. But one thing, she made clear, isn’t complicated at all: impromptu “Smelly Cat” performances for strangers are off the table.