TAKING SIDES

‘Friends’ Star Boldly Changes Stance on Show’s Most Famous Debate

Lisa Kudrow has a new take on whether or not Ross and Rachel were “on a break.”

The never-ending debate about whether Ross and Rachel were “on a break” continued on Friday, as Lisa Kudrow revealed her Friends rewatch has given her a new perspective.

Kudrow, who is promoting the third and final season of her HBO show The Comeback, was asked by Entertainment Tonight where she stands on the issue today.

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“I’ve switched,” Kudrow told the site. “Ross was ridiculous, what a baby! You can’t plan a future with that guy.”

In the show’s third season, Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel Green tells her then-boyfriend Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) that they should take a “break” from the relationship after a heated argument.

Distraught, Ross spends a night out before taking another woman home with him. After Rachel changes her mind the following day and comes over to reconcile, Ross tries to conceal what had happened the night before, to no avail. The character spends the next several seasons arguing about whether or not Ross had “cheated.”

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The plot point has caused lively debate among viewers since the 1997 episode, titled “The One with the Morning After,” premiered.

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Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on the show, had a different take when host James Corden asked the cast for their takes on the “break” question during 2021’s Friends reunion special.

Every cast member, including Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Schwimmer, Aniston, and the late Matthew Perry, answered that the fictional couple was on a “break” at the time.

But at that point, Kudrow hadn’t seen the shows in years.

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She told Conan O’Brien on his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2024 that she’d only begun rewatching the show after Matthew Perry’s death from the effects of ketamine that year.

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“I mean, I’d see it on and be mildly interested, and then I’d see me and say ‘That’s enough of that, I can’t bear it,” she said at the time. “And then after Matthew died, I could start watching the show again because it wasn’t about me, it had to do with him.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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