The best Friend: How did we miss Lisa Kudrow’s comic genius all this time?

Phoebe Buffay never made a ton of sense. How did an oddball masseuse with a history of violence, homelessness and probable mental illness – but, like, in a funny way – become simpatico with the sunny, middle-class yuppies of Friends? “It was just a matter of time before someone had to leave the group, I just always assumed Phoebe would be the one to go,” Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel once said, to Phoebe’s immediate horror. “You live far away, you’re not related – you lift right out.”

An often unspoken element of the Friends friendship dynamics was that Phoebe, as played by the inimitable comic genius Lisa Kudrow, never did fit in. You can sense, in the show’s first season, Kudrow’s co-stars figuring out in real time how their characters interacted with her. Some take on an eyeroll-y affect whenever she expresses a nutty non-sequitur. Others are almost too sympathetic, as if Phoebe isn’t their buddy but a really, really nice extraterrestrial they’re too polite to stop inviting round. By the end of Friends, this would shift: Phoebe became sort of mean. She would yell, bully and remember with fondness how she once mugged Ross; it was obvious which of the gang she couldn’t stand. Were the Friends still friends with her because they liked her, or because they were scared of her?

Whatever the answer, this incongruity – that sense that everyone around them is silently asking “why are you here?” – is the key to Kudrow. Over the course of her 30-year career, the actor has been drawn to misfits and kooks. She likes to play women in possession of any number of life’s advantages – be they beauty, fame, money or power, or some combination of the above – but to whom acceptance is a far-flung fantasy.

It’s there in The Comeback, the subversive, mock-reality satire she made in the immediate wake of Friends. It’s there in the perceptive and empathetic Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, her finest hour as a movie star. And it’s there, too, in Time Bandits, her new, Taika Waititi-produced Apple TV+ series that begins this week. Kudrow is one of our greatest living comedy actors. She’s also someone who understands the hilarity and pathos of being a total, incontrovertible freak.

When Friends became a phenomenon in the mid-Nineties, each of its cast were offered the chance to be movie stars. Many ended up playing variations on the parts they were playing on TV. David Schwimmer’s The Pallbearer is Ross Geller: The Movie. Aniston’s Picture Perfect is about – wait for it – a sharp, sassy New York office gal knee-deep in romantic shenanigans. Matt LeBlanc’s Ed asks the fatal question: what if instead of Joey and Chandler, we had Joey and a baseball-playing chimpanzee? That Kudrow didn’t make one of these half-baked star vehicles was the first sign that she was destined for bigger, knottier things – she told an interviewer in 1995 that she’d just half-heartedly auditioned for the “girlfriend” roles in two films. “They were comedies, and I didn’t think they were funny,” she said.

Instead, Kudrow was drawn to askew and polarising movies that didn’t seem quite so needy for approval. Romy and Michele, released in 1997, was – before its reappraisal as a cult classic – largely written off as a dumb-blonde comedy, with Kudrow merely replicating Phoebe (she’d spend much of this period combatting journalists who insisted she was playing simplistic bimbos). But it’s often far more insightful and surreal than you might remember: a rich, tender coming-of-age tale that also happens to be wildly funny.

It concerns two twentysomethings (Kudrow’s Michele and Mira Sorvino’s Romy) who never quite managed to fit in but, years earlier, at least found each other among the wreckage of adolescence. Invited to their 10-year high school reunion, they grapple with sudden insecurity about their employment, their mutually unexciting love lives and their perceived lack of growth. They plot to (speedily) make over their lives, or at least lie about the parts they don’t have time to change.

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Kudrow gets to mug and pratfall and dance to deliberately hideous choreography, but the real brilliance of her performance lies in its anger. Romy rules the roost when it comes to Romy and Michele, making decisions and curating the pair’s lives. Michele is an increasingly frustrated second banana. A fight breaks out over who is the cutest (“It’s, like, common knowledge, Romy – everybody thinks so!”), while she later confesses that she never understood the life-panic that underpins the entire premise of the movie. “I thought high school was a blast,” she tells Romy towards the end of the film. “And until you told me that our lives weren’t good enough, I thought everything since high school was a blast.” While the film is ostensibly about outsider-ness, it’s Kudrow who recognises that you can be an outsider even within a pair.

Further on the fringes of the world than Romy and Michele – and wearing far less dazzling clothes – was Kudrow’s next movie character, the scene-stealer of a caustic yet frustratingly underseen black comedy called The Opposite of Sex. The 1998 film stars Christina Ricci as a mean teen named Dede, who upends the lives of her gay half-brother, his younger boyfriend, and the sad sister, Kudrow’s Lucia, of his dead ex. Lucia is a lonely schoolteacher furious at a world that’s largely forgotten about her. “God, how does a woman get so bitter?” Dede asks her at one point. “Observation,” Lucia replies sharply, through the drags of a cigarette. Kudrow is sensational, refusing to make Lucia even pitiful in her comic hostility. She’s just marvellously unpleasant. “I know in movies you feel sorry for characters like this,” Dede laments in one of the film’s withering voiceovers. “But in real life? Come on – you wouldn’t be sitting next to her, either.”

“There’s something in [Kudrow] that’s really, really dark,” the film’s writer/director Don Roos said in 1999. “In comedy, it helps when an actor has the knowledge that life is not always perfect. Lisa does. When you look in her eyes, you don’t get the feeling that life is a cabaret.” Roos has been Kudrow’s most prolific collaborator over the years – they’d reunite for 2005’s downbeat ensemble film Happy Endings, and the tricky Natalie Portman marital drama The Other Woman in 2009 – and seemed to spot in her a gravity and complexity long before most critics did. Kudrow is always a great time in films – she has memorable, stinging cameos in comedies such as Easy A, Booksmart and Seth Rogen’s two Bad Neighbours movies – but only Roos has been able to regularly bottle Kudrow’s melancholy and rage on the big screen, her quiet desperation.

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On television, though, that shone through in The Comeback, a mortifying cringe-comedy about a minor Nineties TV star trying to revive her career by having cameras trail her every move. As Valerie Cherish, Kudrow masks years of insecurity and inadequacy behind a carapace of smiles and hacky catchphrases. The series – a meta-comedy born into an era where they were actually novel – takes the form of raw camera footage about Valerie’s return to TV, the future of her career hinging on a woeful new sitcom, called “Room and Bored”, about sexy singles sharing an apartment. Valerie is cast as Aunt Sassy, a carnally minded cartoon in a pink running suit, and an eternal punching bag for the show’s writers.

“I was definitely inspired by The Office because that’s my favourite type of humour: the awkward,” Kudrow said in 2015. “We wanted to bring in the reality show aspect to comment on the amount of humiliation everyone seems to be OK about signing up for. We thought there’s something disastrous about this for our society when it’s: ‘Good for you, you’ve humiliated yourself’.”

The Comeback is often difficult viewing, a vessel for all of Kudrow’s feelings about ageism, sexism and Hollywood. Valerie is a very particular kind of character – an outsider who insists she’s an insider, whose early TV hit was nowhere near as successful as she claims it was, and whose comic timing is questionable. A covert narcissist, she is incredibly sensitive but desperate to keep it under wraps, the tragic irony of her approach to such indignities being that each slight leaves a more obvious scar. There is similarly a bleak madness to her worldview – if she overlooks enough of the abuses sent her way, the universe will reward her; if she verbally expresses her dislike of the tropes of reality TV humiliation, she won’t be humiliated; if she claws back a modicum of fame, she won’t feel so worthless any more.

As Valerie wrestles with herself over the course of the show, Kudrow transcends standard acting. We sometimes find ourselves watching a true nesting doll of a performance – Valerie as Aunt Sassy, Valerie presenting off-the-cuff “authenticity” on her reality show, Valerie as the confident, established Valerie Cherish she wants the world to see. The tragedy of the character, and the wonder of Kudrow’s acting here, is that it’s often impossible for her to shake off the act of performance at all – everything is for show, even when no one is around to film her.

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The great irony of all this is that, despite it containing one of television’s greatest performances, no one particularly cared about The Comeback. It lasted a single season in 2005, drawing mixed reviews and earning just three Emmy nominations (for Kudrow, directing and casting). It took years for it to find an audience on DVD and on streaming. As for its influence, the show’s fingerprints – specifically Valerie’s tragicomic delusion – can be seen in shows as diverse as Veep, Girls, Fleabag and I Hate Suzie. When it was picked up for a second season, nearly a decade after its cancellation, it retained its precise satire while adding even further shading to Valerie’s character. Cast on a gritty HBO show about the production of “Room and Bored”, Valerie is suddenly captivated by the allure of “prestige TV fame”, a respectable kind of attention that swallows up both her marriage and her dignity. Season two is even better than the show’s first year, but was similarly ignored beyond strong write-ups in publications like The New York Times.

It’s a frustrating outcome – a third season has long been mooted but no one has so far commissioned it – but matches Kudrow’s existence as a bit of a comic underdog. Despite finding fame on a series that presumably most people on the planet have watched by now, she has always seemed most comfortable off the beaten track, a place with minimal glitz and a glorious lack of polish. Essentially, where the weirdos live.

In Time Bandits, a new reboot of the Eighties Terry Gilliam fantasy film, she leads a ragtag team of time-hopping thieves, a disparate bunch seemingly drawn together by how wrong they are together. Kudrow speaks in a lower register than normal, but retains that meandering comic discomfort in her voice, that sense that – even when surrounded by like-minded people – she doesn’t quite belong. The character is eccentric, uproarious and richly Kudrowian. Absolutely no one will watch the show, or at least respect it for a few years. I imagine it’s just how Kudrow would want it.

‘Time Bandits’ is streaming weekly on Apple TV+