Lisa Kudrow may be best known for playing the delightfully daffy Phoebe Buffay on Friends. But the role she really relates to is the deeply damaged Valerie Cherish on The Comeback.
“I’m sure the line got blurred for me, being Valerie,” Kudrow, 62, said on Obsessed: The Podcast of the character she has been playing on and off for more than two decades.
The mockumentary show, which first premiered in 2005, explores the impact of reality TV on sitcoms, with the long-awaited third season exploring the looming threat of AI on the industry.
When they shot the first season shortly after the end of Friends, reality TV “looked like it was about to mean the end of scripted television altogether,” Kudrow explained.
On The Comeback, Cherish is a once-notable sitcom actress who lands a new TV gig after a decade of irrelevance. But there’s a catch: she has to be followed by cameras for a simultaneous reality TV series.
In one of The Comeback‘s most iconic first-season scenes, Cherish is forced to wear an embarrassing cupcake suit and fall flat on her face on camera. The showrunner then needlessly requires Cherish to fall over and over again to appease his humiliation.
In retaliation, Cherish punches him hard in the stomach, which in turn leads to a gross-out vomiting scene.
Kudrow said the on-screen dispute spilled over into her biggest on-set argument with the show’s co-creator.
“That night, I have to say, was the only night when I had a huge disagreement with Michael Patrick King. Huge!” Kudrow recalled, referring to The Comeback’s creator.
“He said, ‘You keep turning away from the cameras when you vomit. We’re not getting it on camera.’ And I just said, ‘Right.’ I mean, of course not. No one wants to see that! That’s too far,” the Emmy winner said, who had become fed up with all the nauseating retakes.
Dan Bucatinsky, Kudrow’s longtime producing partner who also stars in the show, remembered thinking, “S--t. S--t. What if this escalates to a point where we’re at a standstill, and we’re not going to actually get it?”
Bucatinsky, 60, talked Kudrow down, and they got the shot.
“Of course, he was 100% right,” Kudrow admitted. “It’s everything the show’s about. I mean, that is not a dignified look, and that’s what it’s about.”
In the same interview, Kudrow recalled the hilarious joke that caught her agent off guard, the other role she wished she had played, and why sitcom writers used to get furious with actors.
Kudrow, who received an Emmy nomination for each season of the show, said her experience as a mother influenced her character, particularly in the second season’s dramatic finale.
The writers were considering whether Cherish would leave her career-defining night at the Emmys to visit her best friend and hairdresser, Mickey, in the hospital. (Robert Michael Morris, who played Mickey, died after the second season aired at 77.)
“And I said 100% yes, because I remembered when my son broke his arm,” Kudrow said.
The actress’s family had been in France visiting in-laws when her son Julian was rushed to the hospital. Because of the language barrier, Kudrow’s francophone husband, Michael Stern, went alone with their son.
“The next morning, my mother-in-law drove me to the hospital, and I could just stay there all day with my son. There was no place on Earth I wanted to be. And not being with him was utter torture,” Kudrow said.
“Valerie doesn’t have a kid,” she added. “She has a husband, and she has Mickey.”
The first two seasons of The Comeback are available to stream on HBO Max. Season three will premiere on March 22 on HBO.
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