Lisa Kudrow wasn’t good enough to nail ‘Friends’ role with one audition
nypost.comstarred as Phoebe Buffay for a decade on the NBC series, had to prove to director Jim Burrows that she was perfect for the part after he had previously fired her from another show.
Kudrow had been let go from Burrows’ other iconic series, “Frasier,” after the pilot episode wrapped in 1993 — the year before “Friends” aired. “I was cast in ‘Frasier’ as Roz — mistakenly cast.
I didn’t know that at the time,” she explained on the “Jess Cagle Podcast With Julia Cunnigham.” “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.'”Mercifully, she was called in to do one last round of auditions on “Friends,” which ultimately earned her the part. “So then we’re doing ‘Friends’ and I had to do a special audition for Jim Burrows.
You have to do auditions for producers and studio, network, but in between all of that, I had to go in and read for Jim Burrows,” she recounted. “I thought maybe everyone had to do it, but I found out a few years ago that I was the only one.
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