Lisa Kudrow Credits This Friends Co-Star With Helping Her Overcome Struggle Playing Phoebe

While Lisa Kudrow nailed her role as Phoebe Buffay on Friends, playing the character wasn’t easy for her. So her co-star Matt LeBlanc stepped up to help.

The 56-year-old star made her comments while hiking with Kevin Nealon for an episode of his YouTube web series Hiking With Kevin, which was posted on Thursday.  Kudrow, a graduate of the prestigious Vassar College, where she majored in Biology, rose to fame as an actress with her popular, eccentric and somewhat ditzy role on Friends, which aired for 10 seasons until 2004.

“I had played dumb girls, sure. But it wasn’t really me,” Kudrow told Nealon. “I feel like s–t, I tricked them. At the audition, I was the only one who could cope with the audition process and that’s how I got it, I think. So I had to work hard at being Phoebe, you know.”

After a few years, LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani on the show, noticed something was wrong and gave Kudrow a needed pep talk.

“And then like third season in, I was struggling so much,” she said. “And Leblanc was like, ‘What’s going on with you?’ And I said, ‘I can’t, I don’t think I have it, I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And he went, ‘You’re her, relax, you got it. You’ve been doing this f–king character for three years. You’re working too hard. That’s your problem. You don’t need to work this hard. Relax.’ He was right.”

Kudrow also confessed that she has never actually watched an episode of Friends.

“I should,” she said. “I hear it’s good.”