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The Friends cast was known to be a tight-knit group on and off screen, but Lisa Kudrow’s latest revelation has shocked Us!
The Phoebe Buffay actress, 61, said that she and her famous pals — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer and the late Matthew Perry — only met up for dinner once after the show ended but before their 2021 televised reunion.
“We only had dinner, the six of us, once before, since the show had ended,” Kudrow shared on the Tuesday, December 10, episode of Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast (via Sky News).
According to Kudrow, the dinner took place around a decade after the hit NBC sitcom ended in 2004, and the stars “didn’t miss a beat.”
“It was so great that it was like, ‘We should do this more,’” she added.
Alas, the next time the famous friends all got together was in 2021 to record HBO Max’s Friends: The Reunion, in which they revisited their famous characters and story lines.
Little did the cast — or fans — know that would be the last time we’d see all six stars together. Perry died at age 54 from the acute effects of ketamine in October 2023.
“It shook us up, I have to say,” Kudrow told Ferguson on Tuesday’s podcast. “He said it won’t be a surprise, but it will be a shock, and that was exactly right. So smart, that is true — it wasn’t a surprise, but it was a shock.”
“It was a big jolt,” she added.
Speaking to Dax Shepard on his “Armchair Expert” podcast on Monday, December 9, Kudrow said she takes some comfort in the fact that Perry was happy at the time of his death.
“This will sound odd. I’m more comforted that he was happy the day he died,” she said. “He got to die happy. And to me, that was a gift.”
Kudrow also shared that the bond between the six Friends stars didn’t just happen overnight.
“It was great, we really did get along,” she said. “We also worked really hard at being friends. That six-way relationship took some work and we did it.”
“If someone said something or did something, it didn’t get too big, because it was, ‘Can I talk to you?’ — usually not me, because I had to learn to be, ‘Can I talk to you about something?’ because I never knew that was allowed!” Kudrow explained. “But I saw it modeled really well by Courteney and Jennifer and Matt. Respectful communication.”
