For 10 seasons, Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay on the beloved ’90s sitcom, Friends . She was quirky and hilarious, and just all-around amazing.
During this time, she got super close to the cast and crew — but, apparently, not close enough.
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That’s because the actress just revealed something super surprising: her car was searched every night after filming Friends .
Say whaaat? Spoiler: props were involved.
Some TV shows will go to extreme lengths to protect their props.
Earlier this week, Ann Shae, a set designer from The Big Bang Theory , revealed that they were instructed to put microchips in their props…
Talk about extreme!
She told *Metro*: “Warner Bros was so strict.”
“Normally heads of department would have access to the stage so we can go work on the weekends. But they closed the stages down months in advance on the weekend.”
She continued:
“And they micro-chipped every single item on all of the sets and made sure they could track it. We were instructed to give everything we had for archives and so we did. It took months and months of packing and logging.”
If the cast wanted an item, they had to go to the big-wigs to ask for it, regardless of how long they had worked on the show.
“Warner Brothers doesn’t typically give away stuff to the actors, so if the actors did get anything, all I can say is they dealt with Warner Brothers directly.”
At the show’s end, Ann did her best to give the cast something memorable.
She was a total champ and made hundreds of replica door numbers to give to the cast and crew. Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard?!
Since it’s a sitcom where they film in the same places for years and years, the door numbers actually hold a lot of meaning.
I wonder where all the actors have the door numbers placed in their homes. Now that’s an interview that needs to happen!
If this lockdown on props sounds a bit dramatic and INTENSE, it’s actually a lot more common than you’d think!
Another famous sitcom that had an intense lockdown on props was Friends .
I know, right?! THAT SET SEEMED SO FUN!
The rules around props were recently revealed in a gorgeous interview with Lisa Kudrow.
Lisa Kudrow, who played Pheobe Buffay, made a virtual appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to spill allllll the props tea.
It all began when Jimmy noticed some Friends memorabilia behind Lisa.
“This one’s mine,” the *Space Force* actress said when she grabbed a bobblehead of Phoebe playing guitar.
There was a bobblehead of each of the cast members there as well.
“It doesn’t look like me, at all,” she said before showing off the one of Ross who had his arm broken off.
“It looks like a young Seinfeld,” Jimmy joked.
“They don’t look like us, I think by design,” Lisa said.
This could have been a reference to the recent comments Lisa made about Friends having a more diverse cast if the show had been filmed in 2020.
Lisa made these comments during an interview with the *Times* U.K earlier this month.
“It would not be an all-white cast, for sure,” Lisa said of the 2020 version of the show.
She also called the show a “time capsule” of the ’90s and early ’00s.
“To me, [Friends] should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong.”
“Yes, it’s a fun comedy, but it’s also about people connecting, and part of what appeals about it now is that young people have this unconscious nostalgia for personal connection.”
Since the show has been criticized for not aging well, she went on to defend the series a bit.
She did so by saying that the show was “very progressive” at the time.
And when you think about it, she’s not wrong!
She explained: “There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together.”
“We had surrogacy, too.”
Not many shows in the ’90s were concerned with sharing these types of stories, so there’s no denying Friends was ahead of it’s time in that regard.
Lisa also described what she thinks Phoebe Buffay and her husband, Mike (Crapbag), would be up to in quarantine right now!
Hint: the kids they always wanted would be involved!
ARE YOU GUYS CRYING YET OR IS IT JUST ME?!
“I feel like if they’d had kids, she would be militaristic about creating art,” she explained.
“So their place would be overrun with huge, outlandish projects.”
Isn’t that the most Phoebe thing EVER?! I hope one of her kids can play the guitar!!!!
But back to her interview with Jimmy. Things got super revealing when he asked Lisa if she took anything after 10 seasons.
To this, she revealed that she was actually given a memento.
“You see that,” she said, pointing to a cookie jar that says “Cookie Time.”
“That was in Monica and Rachel’s apartment.”
She then shared the hilarious story behind why Matthew Perry (Chandler) decided to give it to her.
“We’re shooting a scene, years before we were finished, and my line was, ‘Oh! I better get going’, like, ‘Oh! I’m late, I better get going’,” Kudrow explained.
But then she realized that she wasn’t *actually* wearing a watch. This was a time before iPhones, people!
And, since they were already filming, it was too late to grab one. This led the actress to improvise as only the greatest of entertainers can do!
“As the words were coming out I went, ‘Oh, good, there’s a clock’,” she said.
“I gestured to that and said, ‘Oh! Look at the time. I gotta get going.'”
“And during shooting, Matthew said, ‘Did you point to the cookie jar and say look at the time?'”
WHY YES, MATHEW PERRY, SHE DID! It’s called acting, sweetie.
While Lisa loved the gift, she did have to double-check to make sure Matthew actually got permission to give it to her.
That’s because the set had some strict rules on taking props. Like, some really *really* strict rules.
“I mean, my car used to get searched every night when I left,” she revealed.
Isn’t that so crazy!
For more of Lisa’s interview with Jimmy, you can check it out down below!
Is there any prop you’d want from the Friends set in an ideal world?! Mine would have to be a coffee cup from Central Perk!
