Best Of: Jason Segel / Lisa Kudrow

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, Jason Segel. In the comedy-drama series Shrinking, he plays a psychotherapist who's having a nervous breakdown but is continuing to see patients. Segel talks about what he's learned about psychotherapy and himself playing a therapist. Also, Lisa Kudrow. She's nominated for two Emmy Awards for the final season of the HBO comedy The Comeback, which she co-created. Lisa is best known as Phoebe on Friends, but long before that, she was performing as a kid for the people around her. I imitated Lily Tomlin, Edith Ann, that character on Laugh-In. I'd go to slumber parties, and to me it was like doing a show, and then lip-sync songs, and then have everyone do it. I was like a cruise director. And book critic Maureen Corrigan has a late summer gift for us. Many new suspense novels. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Terry has our first interview. Here she is. My guest Jason Segel is nominated for an Emmy for his leading role in the series Shrinking. The first three seasons are streaming on Apple TV. When we first meet his character Jimmy, he's a psychotherapist who's having a nervous breakdown but continues to work with his patients. Believing he's having a breakthrough, he intervenes in his patients' lives. He gives them inappropriate advice to do things Jimmy believes will change their lives for the better and prevent them from complaining about the same things week after week without ever making an effort to fix the problems. The reason Jimmy is falling apart is that his wife was killed in a car accident a year ago. His teenage daughter is in high school when the series starts. She accuses him of being so absorbed in his own grief. He's emotionally abandoned her. Jimmy's mentor and colleague is played by Harrison Ford, who's also nominated for an Emmy, as is co-star Jessica Williams. Segel got his first memorable role in Freaks and Geeks. The characters were high school friends. After the show was canceled, Segel wrote and starred in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He wrote and was the human star of the movie musical The Muppets. He was one of the stars of How I Met Your Mother, played writer David Foster Wallace, and starred in the movie The Muppets. He also starred in the film The End of the Tour, and wrote and starred in the series Dispatches from Elsewhere. Let's start with a scene from the first episode of Shrinking. It will give you an idea of how Segel's character has lost his bearings as a therapist and is pushing his patients to do what he thinks they need to do to move forward. Here he is with his patient Grace, played by Heidi Gardner. You just kept on going on and on about how dumb I am. You're not dumb, Grace. He said if it weren't for my great s**t, no one would want to take care of me. So, that's almost nice. That's not nice. I know, but he loves me. Enough. Grace, we've been doing this for two years. Two years of your life! I have never seen a guy tell a woman that she is dumb and lucky she has great s**t and thought to myself, "Wow, they must really be in love!" And he keeps telling me how great he is. Well, I saw him. He's not that great. His muscles are too big. His shirts are too tight. Nobody likes that. It's gross. I am sorry. I don't know what's happening because I was talking and. Grace, your husband is emotionally abusive. He's not working on it. He doesn't intend to. He's made you think it's all you deserve. It's not. Just f**king leave him. It's not that easy. It is that easy. You don't have any kids. Just go to your sister's in Vancouver. But then. Leave him or I'm done being your therapist. Leave him. Look. Okay? Okay? Jason Segel, welcome back to Fresh Air and congratulations on the Emmy nomination and on the series. So I should say the outcome does not go well. Yeah, it depends on how you look at it. It's good to talk to you again, by the way. I was saying to you in our little pre-interview session. You're one of my very first interviews when I was a little guy. I mean, in my early 20s and it's so nice to be talking to you again. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you back. We also talked about the Muppets movie and that was a lot of fun. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. Love that film. First of all, what should Jimmy have done? What do you think? Well, it's an interesting thing because this is the extreme example of this kind of therapy method that the show is based on, this group of therapists who kind of broke convention. And realized that people were spending a lot of time week after week rehashing where things came from in their past. And in reality, what they really needed was some hope about what to do on Tuesday. You know, it's like I have to have this talk with my boss on Tuesday and I have all these feelings about it. And you're spending week after week figuring out why you have feelings about authority. But Tuesday is coming, you know? And so this group of therapists decided that they were going to kind of change the rules a bit, tell people what to do on Tuesday. And then in the meantime, we will get to figuring out why you had such a hard time figuring it out. And so this is the beginning of that approach to therapy that we see, you know, as the show progresses of, you know, people really just want to be told what to do. To some extent. We can figure out the why of it all. But what am I supposed to do about my abusive husband? What am I supposed to do about, you know, my work situation? Who are these therapists that you're talking about? One of them is Phil Stutz, who there is a documentary about. And he has a whole web of people that, you know, that he trained and works with. A big group of therapists who all have this same idea that what people really want is some hope. And if you can send a patient out of their comfort zone and say, you know, I've got this problem. I've got this problem. You know? And if you can send a patient out of the room with some hope and some direction, they're much more likely to come back. And they're much more likely to affect change in their life. Did you participate in that kind of therapy? Listen. One of these guys has become my actual therapist. And it totally changed my life. He's absolutely incredible. And, you know, one of the things that I've found is that, you know, I've always wanted to be a therapist. I've always wanted to be a therapist. And I've always wanted to be a therapist. been a really helpful thing. I will say like um and i i have throughout my past been kind of hesitant to talk about like personal life stuff but i'm getting married this year and my fiancee thank you so much um my fiancee does a very similar thing for me um she is a dancer and she kind of lives in her body and is a very grounding force that i have been needing in my life of someone who just says hey i know you're thinking a lot right now but you know our life is great right and i don't have that voice that voice does not like live in me and so um that's also been really helpful for kind of kind of calming me down a bit you know with decision making did you and do you always think that you know you can see both sides well this decision would be better than that decision so it's hard to decide which is best but you're sure there's going to be consequences if you make the wrong choice yeah i wish it was more rational than it is i think it's honestly i think it's like a close cousin to ocd i think that it's like the actual stuff is a little bit of a mask you know what i mean i'm like fooling myself if i think any of this obsession or worrying is about anything real but you know it's as simple as like oh you know what if i'm worrying about the property line right now life must actually be in pretty good shape you know what i mean it's learning that kind of stuff do you actually have ocd were you diagnosed with that yeah and it it manifested in a bunch of different ways but like it you know when i was young really really young it was night terrors that turned into like compulsively checking doorknobs and i've found a lot of ways to channel it into creativity creativity has been a really good friend i mean it's been my beloved since i'm young until i met my partner like create me and creativity were were ride or die jason siegel speaking with terry gross he's nominated for an emmy for his leading role in the series shrinking we'll hear more of their conversation after a short break i'm tanya mosley and this is fresh air weekend this is fresh air weekend i'm tanya mosley let's get back to terry's interview with jason siegel he's nominated for an emmy for his starring role in the comedy drama series shrinking as a psychotherapist who's having his own mental health crisis after his wife dies in a car crash i want to get back to the kind of therapy that inspired the kind of therapy your character um is practicing in the series of intervening in people's lives and telling them what they should do as opposed to trying to like gently lead them to question themselves and discover a solution for themselves um has that has the series been controversial among therapists or suggesting that that approach could be a very helpful approach as well as it could be a destructive approach all i can tell i don't read the internet at all i'm scared of the internet i thought people i thought you might know therapists who are telling you directly well that all i will tell you is that the therapists who have come up to me about it have almost unanimously said that it is wish fulfillment for therapists because the experience you are sitting there knowing exactly what the answer is and week after week you are trying to use like the socratic method to like guide them to what to you is a very obvious decision you know and it's kind of funny because in real life your friends who are the least qualified are the most eager to tell you what to do and your therapist who is the most qualified feels the least enabled to tell you what to do and so i i think that therapists love the idea of being able to just say like oh my god just leave him just leave him you know how is the serious pitch to you and it was your idea apparently to add this kind of therapy no not really it was um brett goldstein and bill lawrence came to me um they had both had similar ideas about a therapist we should mention they are the creators of ted lasso i think bill and jason sudeikis are the creators of the lasso brett is a writer on it and then bill brett and i are the creators of shrinking the reality is i kind of got a great free ride on it bill and brett had thought of these therapy ideas okay and um they didn't have a script yet but they they each had this idea about a therapist going through a nervous breakdown and they pitched me the idea and i think my contribution to it was what you had brought up which is i feel like i have garnered a lot of goodwill over my career and people are rooting for the characters i play let's push this guy as far as we can into the red because i i feel like i can pull him out of the nosedive so let's be brave and you know in the opening i think it's the opening scene of the show i'm in my backyard with sex workers and booze and drugs and my daughter is upstairs like it is it is a pretty unlikable first depiction you know um because i felt like if you start this guy at the rockiest of rock bottoms you have a long way to go to pull him out and i just believed i could make you feel sympathetic for him so then we jumped in and we wrote the pilot and made the show and that's history the the second truth to how it happened allegedly is um i i have a place in a town called ohai a little country town and um i love it there um and i walk around town like big bird in ohai i wake up every morning and i take this 45 minute walk through town that's kind of like um like the beginning of beauty and the beast i'm like waving at the baker and you know like shops are opening and i just like i just love it i feel very much like myself um apparently what really happened is one of the producers was on vacation in ohai and he was like i'm gonna go to the beach and i'm gonna go to the ohai and i was taking one of these muppety walks through town and he saw me from across the street and texted bill lawrence i just saw jason siegel he seems like a happy guy let's make a show with him and here we are so we've heard you with a patient in a scene from the series and now i want to play a scene with you talking to your mentor paul who is considerably older than you are he's played by harrison ford paul in the series uh gets diagnosed with parkinson's disease in his series his symptoms progress through the series and you've been really helpful to him as his symptoms have progressed you've been there for him but um at this point in the series paul harrison ford's character is leaving la and moving to connecticut to be close to his daughter who he'd been estranged from for a long time and he's been estranged from in the past but the relationship has started uh started up again he owns the building where he practiced along with you and along with jessica williams whose character gabby he gave the building and the practice to because it was her dream to set up a trauma center so now she's going to be able to do that and he knew from the past that you didn't want to take over the whole practice but you feel betrayed because he didn't consult you before giving it to gabby and you found out late that he was moving three thousand miles away so you're feeling very abandoned um and oh man i know what you're about to play i haven't watched this scene since i did it why were you afraid to no quite the opposite um this scene with harrison that you're about to play i knew was coming for the whole season you know because i get to kind of the storylines in advance and i think the whole season i was thinking to myself boy when we get to the end of this season i'm gonna be on a balcony with harrison ford acting my guts out you know and it's really important to me that i be great you know it's like you're gonna play basketball with michael jordan or something and man when that scene came i was not afraid and i just was honest i didn't show off and i did all the things that i feel like make a scene good and at the end when they said cut harrison looked at me and he said so excited you did it kid and we hugged and uh i didn't need to add any other like uh judgment to that moment does that make sense sure and he calls you kid in the series too yeah yeah no he's he's become a really special part of my life but yeah let's hear it i haven't i haven't heard it before okay and to set it up just a little further the subtext of this is that jimmy always felt like hurt by his own father and emotionally abandoned because his father was always like disappearing on him and now uh jimmy's father is going to go on a fishing trip instead of going to jimmy's daughter's graduation and jimmy's really angry with his father for no abandoning his daughter. At least that's how Jimmy sees it. So here you are as Jimmy with Harrison Ford, as your mentor and fellow therapist, Paul. You speak first. You gave the practice to Gabby. We talked about this years ago. You said you hated paperwork and all you wanted to do was spend time with the patients. People change. You didn't even check with me, Paul. Would you have wanted it? No. So you're angry with me for not offering you something that you don't want. Yes, I am. I'm supposed to be your guy. I've been your guy. And this, this is how you treat me? I don't deserve this. Easy, kid. No, I'm mad, Paul. And I'm embarrassed. I have to find out from Meg that you're moving? You don't even have the decency to come and look me in my eyes and tell me that you're leaving me. Let's take a break. I think these feelings that you're having might be meant for someone else. No, I think they're meant for both of you. I get it now. I'm not as important to you as you are to me. I just feel stupid it took me that long to realize it. So how does the scene sound to you actually hearing it now? Um. I don't want to put you on the spot and feel like you have to brag about your performance. No, no. Luckily, that's not how I feel. I always feel vulnerable when I hear or watch myself acting because I think like the feeling you're feeling, if you're doing it right, is so vital that then it translating to the outside part of you always like by the clumsy act of expression is going to be so vital. I feel like I sound like how people sound when they're feeling those things, you know? Sounds like you're choking. Yeah. I try really hard. I think that this like might be the key to acting. I don't know. But I try really hard not to show off. I think that's one of the things that you learn as you're getting more and more into acting. I think that's one of the things that you learn as you're getting more and more familiar with working with a camera. Boy, you want to show off like the camera's getting ever closer to you as the coverage goes on, you know? So some parts of you are activating like, oh, gosh, it's my turn, you know? Or, oh, it's getting closer. Now's the time to really show them, you know? And so I think a big thing that I try to do is to be, oh, you know what? This is maybe an easy way to say it. I was really interested in why I thought Jeff Bridges was so good. So I went back and I read reviews of some of his great performances. And one of them said, Jeff Bridges may be the least self-conscious actor working today. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's the goal, is to be as unselfconscious between action and cut as possible. Like, just don't show off. Don't try to show them. Just be real. How honest can you be between action and cut, you know? And then you start adding, like, taking it for a spin while you're out there. And that requires some bravery and all that. But I guess during that scene with Harrison, between action and cut, I just tried to really know what I was feeling. I understand when people talk about acting, like, I might call myself the character, like, understand what Jimmy was feeling. That's not really my experience of doing that. I'm like, what am I feeling right now, you know? I don't have to search, like, what is Jimmy feeling? What am I feeling? And then just, like, just do that. Jason Segel, it's been great to talk with you again. I really appreciate you coming back to the show. And congratulations on your Emmy nomination. Terry, thanks so much. It's so nice to both of us still be at it after all these years. Pretty darn cool. Jason Segel is nominated for an Emmy for his starring role in the comedy-drama series Shrinking. He spoke, with Terry Gross. Summer days are dwindling down to a precious view. So our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, is scooping up some of the season's most interesting suspense fiction. Here's her review. It's the end of summer, so let's grab what escape we can, which for me means reading suspense fiction. Six years ago, I stopped eating mushrooms. The cause was Silvia Moreno-Garcia's horror novel, Mexican Gothic, in which fungi become frightful. Moreno-Garcia, who excels at playing around with genre fiction, recently brought out a noir novel set in 1940s Mexico called The Intrigue. It's so stylishly evil, it begs for a movie version in black and white. The plot is a classic one, in which a predator risks becoming a patsy. A con artist named Ulysses makes his money by placing ads in the Lonely Hearts sections of magazines, and waiting to see if any rich widows or spinsters respond. When Perla Inclan, the owner of a mansion-turned-boarding house in the port of Veracruz, invites Ulysses to visit, he thinks he's in clover. But trouble awaits in the form of Perla's niece. Inez rightly wonders what a man who bears a resemblance to a movie star like Tyrone Power is doing courting her grim aunt. Moreover, Inez desperately wants out from under her aunt's thumb. Who could blame her? Here's a snippet of a scene. Where Perla announces to friends that she's chaperoning Inez to a dance. I will escort her, Perla said firmly. My father always told us ladies from good families are like delicate flowers, which must be carefully pressed inside a good book. And I agree with him. Inez's hand wrapped around a fork, her fingers squeezing it tightly, she wished she could stab her aunt with it. A carefully pressed flower, she thought. A dead thing. The double and triple crosses, as well as the body count, mount in the intrigue, which subverted all my guesses about who would be left standing at the end. This summer, Richard Russo brought out his first crime thriller. Originally written as a TV series, Under the Falls is set in upstate New York, in a place called Stone Mountain. The plot, like that of Moreno-Garcia's novel, is indebted to noir, where the past is never really past. Tyler Sinclair hasn't been back to Stone Mountain since he ran off from an abusive father and romantic complications at 18. Now, 18 years later, he's returning as a big-shot country rock singer. The occasion is a fundraiser for one of Tyler's old friends, nicknamed Doc, who was paralyzed in a diving accident when they were all teenagers. But as Doc now informs Tyler, not everybody in the mountain is a Tyler Sinclair fan. It's not just that you made all that money, Doc explains. It's that you made it writing songs about us, about our lives. Where's our cut, is how they look at it. The benefit concert ends in multiple deaths, prompting Tyler and others to excavate his hometown's secrets. Beyond the crime plot, though, Russo excels here at what he's long excelled at, namely, chronicling the world of working-class America and the limited opportunities for the people of America. For those in places like Stone Mountain. George Pelicanos started writing his crime series starring African-American private investigator Derek Strange in 2001. In the intervening years, Pelicanos has written for series like The Wire and Treme, but he's always kept intermittent faith with Strange. Fourteen years after his last outing, an older but still streetwise Strange returns in the blue flame, investigating two murders that have struck within a once-tight group of friends. It's been long enough that I can repeat a cliché about Pelicanos, namely, that he does for Washington, D.C., what Chandler did for L.A. Strange takes us into the D.C. the tourists and politicians don't know, from neat row house neighborhoods to the D.C. Central District. detention facility. The title, The Blue Flame, refers to the fact that Strange, an ex-cop, still has that burning cop curiosity. I hope it's never extinguished. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. Coming up, Lisa Kudrow talks about her HBO show, The Comeback, and why she recently binged Friends for the first time. I'm Tanya Mosley. Before my guest, Lisa Kudrow, was famous, back when she was doing improv, she created a character, an actress determined to stay in show business no matter what it cost her. That character eventually became Valerie Cherish, the relentlessly optimistic actress who has been chasing her comeback since 2005. Kudrow developed Valerie for HBO with writer and director Michael Patrick King, building a character that she would never forget. She's a character who wants to be back on television so badly that she will endure almost anything. Demotions, humiliations, and writers half her age who barely hide what they think of her. Now in the show's final season, Valerie finally gets what she has been chasing, the lead in a network sitcom. The catch? AI is writing the scripts. The role has Kudrow up for two Emmys this year, one for acting and one for writing. It's the latest chapter in a career that includes 10 seasons as Phoebe on Friends whose finale drew more than 50 million viewers. She won her first Emmy for that role in 1998. Her credits run long, so here are just a few. Web Therapy, the improvised comedy she co-created, playing a therapist who conducts very short sessions online, Who Do You Think You Are?, the genealogy series she executive produced for 11 seasons, and Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, a sequel announced earlier this summer. And Lisa Kudrow, welcome back to Fresh Air. Hi. Thank you. Nice to be back. I want to play a clip from this third season. In this scene, Valerie has finally gotten the network sitcom. She's always won it. And she's the lead. And the show is called How's That? And the secret has just come out, though, that her fellow cast members are learning that the writers on the show are actually AI. And the reactions vary. So here you are with the actors who are your castmates, Tim Bagley, Richie. Brittany O'Grady, Barry Henley, Zane Phillips, and Matt Cook, who speaks first. Let's listen. Come on, everyone. Everyone hates AI. I didn't sign up to be on an AI-written show. Yeah, should we be calling our agents? Please don't. Please don't. You know, if this gets out and the studio doesn't want it to, then I don't know, they could pull the plug on the whole thing. No. This information is top secret and even had to sign an NDA. Sir, what's the big deal? Oh. You can't do a show without writers. And we're not. We have Al. Al is AI, though. Al's a bot. Yeah. Well. Is that why no one would ever give me his contact information? Well, okay. Guys, listen. Okay. We're the first. And the show's tested well. So I think we just take the material that you are given, bot or not, funny or not funny, and do everything you can to make it great. All right? We're actors. That's what we do. Right? That's right. It's our job to make things funnier. Uh-huh. But a lot of times when I do that, the writers get angry if I change a word. So many times I've made the writing so much better than it was. I've been told that. Yeah. And then I have to go back and do the words the way that they wrote it, and the audience doesn't laugh, and they look at me like, "I'm not funny." I knew the joke wasn't funny the whole week, but I can't say that. Right. Right? It's like when they give me a line that's not funny, and they say, "Gabrielle, do it sexier." That's probably why it's been so fun here. It turns out there are no writers. It's just us. Yeah. I've been enjoying this. Yeah. You know, I don't think I ever liked a writer. Oh, I love that scene so much. I know. You know, it's so funny. It's so funny. It's like this show is just as much about the writers as it is about Valerie. Very much. Yes. But what I love about that scene is just, like, the anatomy of a mob, you know, that it starts with, "What? It's AI? You lied to us? This is a betrayal? We're doing this without writers? That's not right." And then once it's like, "Well, if you say something, they might take the whole thing away. Oh, no. I don't want that." And then, you know, "Yeah, you know what? I don't like writers," and it's just, like, complete 180. That's what human beings do, I think. You're the youngest of three siblings. You grew up in a suburb of L.A., the San Fernando Valley, Tarzana. What was your place in the house? My place? Yeah. As the youngest? Yeah. Well, usually, like, the least competent person, right? I mean, that's the way it is. I'm the youngest by six and eight years, you know? So I was sort of an only child at times, because they're out and away. And it's the '70s also, so it was different, right? It was, "Yeah, you'll be fine. All right. Do whatever you want." I ate, you know, baked M&Ms and Doritos for breakfast on the weekends, and that was great. Conan O'Brien, who's your longtime friend, you all met very early in your careers when you were just kids. You were just starting out here in Los Angeles. He said, when you were on his show, he described you as, quote, "someone with a Victorian sense of morality," which I thought was a really interesting way to describe someone. And accurate. Well, first off, what does that mean? You know, yes, I was very much like that. And still, is that what he was saying? Maybe. But that felt like the safest way to be. Did you ever have a wild streak growing up? No. No? No. You were pretty straight-laced all the way through. I think so. But, you know, I was funny, but not a class clown, because they were annoying. They got in the way of the lessons during the day. Right. And your morality was like, "We need to be good students, quiet in class." Yes. I like structure. Yep. So you would make people laugh, but you weren't the class clown. What kind of things would you do to make folks laugh? Do you remember? Yeah. I imitated. Lily Tomlin, Edith Ann, that character on Laugh-In, I'd go to slumber parties. And to me, it was like doing a show. I would lip-sync songs and then have everyone do it. And I was like a cruise director. Is that where the seed came for you in acting? When did you really understand that, "I like this, this attention"? Well, maybe it was attention, because I was the youngest, or I don't know. But it made people happy and engaged, and we were all doing something together. And, I mean, my family was funny. My dad's hilarious. My brother and sister were really funny. So I would take their material, which was, you know, too mature for anyone else my age, but that made me kind of something. But it was so great to make people laugh. That was the best thing ever. You have talked a lot over the years about your dad and his work. He studied cluster headaches, and he founded the first private headache clinic in the western part of the United States. A lot of what he founded back then is still part of standard treatment today. But when you were a little girl, did you have an understanding of it from the start? Yeah. He was an internist. And then in 1971, he switched to just treating and researching headache. Mm-hmm. And he was eight. So, yeah, I was old enough to understand what he was doing. And as I got older also, you know, because he lectured all over the world about headache, and so he would write his lecture and do it to me, because he wanted to make sure it was all understandable. So I'm maybe like 13, 15. You know, I don't remember how old. He proposed a hypothesis for, you know, the potential mechanism of cluster headache. And so he wanted to make sure I could fully understand it. Because if you understood it, then a crowd of folks would. Neurologists will definitely understand it. And I remember him saying to me, you have to understand that right now, you are one of the few people on the planet who understands more about headache from listening to all my talks than a lot of people. Because I thought, all right, now you have to. to be an adult. Like, that's a fun thing. But that's, you know, I've seen actors on TV and, you know, I've heard about all their divorces. Do you know? And I thought, that's not the adult you want to be. Okay. And in college, I just, I fell in love with biology and thought, yeah, yeah, I want to be a doctor. What changed? What changed was after I graduated, a couple things. I mean, there's a weird thing that I can't explain. You know, I'd come home from on break and be driving around LA and I'd hear, you know, a commercial for a sitcom. And it just sounded like, well, that's a horse of a different color. Like, it's so broad and it's not funny. And, but there's a laugh track. And I'd think, oh, that's pushing it so hard. They're hitting it so hard. And then, why don't they throw it away? Lisa, remember to throw it away when you do it. And that was just a thought that would come in your mind. Come in my mind. And I think, wait, why do I have to do that? I'm, that's not what I'm going to be doing. And the big motivation also, my brother's best friend is John Levitz. I grew up with John Levitz. I graduate from college. He gets on Saturday Night Live and, oh, it's not just this thing that happens to a magic few. And then I'm really feeling very strongly, you better do this now. You're only 22 and you have no responsibilities. It's a, it's, I imagine a pretty selfish endeavor to pursue acting and now's the time and don't have any regrets later. I want to transition to, to Friends with the few moments I have left with you. I'm sorry about the loss of, of Matthew Perry. Thanks. I know that you, for lots of different reasons, didn't watch the show. You started watching it after he passed away. Yeah, because it was too much about me before. I didn't want to watch me. And then after Matthew passed away, there were so many, well, there's always a marathon anyway. So luckily there was a marathon to watch and I was so happy to see Matthew so funny. And it was, yeah, it was a great way to sort of process him not being here and then really enjoyed how much he made me laugh and then how much everybody made me laugh and even myself. Yeah. What did you notice about yourself? That sometimes, yeah, it was funny. Sometimes. Oh my gosh. That's good. No, but I mean, okay, for the most part, I enjoyed what I did. And then there were times where it's like, well, I mean, that you should have your license taken away or, you know, that's not, don't do that. What are you doing? Anything in particular that made you cringe? He's her lobster. I have it locked, loaded. It's ready to go. E, playing with a voice. Yeah. Uh-uh. What about you singing? You know, what about your songs and your guitars? I love those songs. Yeah. Those songs make me laugh. Yeah. Those are really, really funny. I want to play a scene from the third season of Friends. This is Phoebe and Ross played by David Schwimmer. And as she explains to him, who's a paleontologist, that she doesn't buy evolution or gravity. Let's listen. That's fine. Go ahead and scoff. You know, there are a lot of things out there that I don't believe in, but that doesn't mean they're not true. Such as? Like crop circles or the Bermuda Triangle or evolution. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But you don't, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Nah, not really. You don't believe in evolution? I don't know. It's just, you know, monkeys, Darwin, you know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy. Too easy? Uh, too, the process of every living thing on this planet evolving over millions of years from single-celled organisms is, is too easy? Yeah, I just don't buy it. Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like, like, like the air we breathe, like gravity. Oh, okay. Don't get me started on gravity. You, uh, you don't believe in gravity? Well, it's not so much that, you know, like, I don't believe in it. You know, it's just, I don't know, lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down as I am being pushed. She was ditzy, but also deep. To play that combination of those two things together, I mean, it takes a very specific way that you were able to nail. There's also a lot of, Yeah. There's the, the chemistry there. You can even hear it even with us, without us watching it. Right. Oh, yeah. That was the best part of that part of my life. Everyone's so good. I can imagine getting a role like Friends. It's a role of a lifetime because it's one of those roles where the show itself becomes a part of Americana. And so you're always connected to that. So that, there's the blessing part of it. Yeah. Did you ever have another relationship with it, though, that, that constantly being, um, called Phoebe, being referenced, people coming up to you, probably just saying lines and wanting you to repeat those lines, stuff like that? Well, my first response is always, I have zero complaints about Friends or anything to do with it because every part of it was just the relationship with the other actors. We had fun. That is so rare and real honest respect, mutual respect. It was a really good relationship. That took some work and we did the work, you know? It was great. Well, part of it is you all spent 16, 20 hours a day with each other. Right, especially in the beginning, you know, but we, we made sure we did. We played poker together while we're waiting for the run through or while, you know, any downtime, we spent that time together on set. Um, and Jimmy Burrows helped also. And, you know, we just lost him. So that's heartbreaking. Jimmy Burrows is a legendary director and creator. He did Cheers. And before that, his first job was Mary Tyler Moore Show. And then directed some, the Bob Newhart Show. No, and Will and Grace, he did every one of them. So he did the first 10 episodes of Friends. He did the pilot and the first 10 episodes. And, you know, it was his idea that Warner Brothers give him the Warner Brothers jet, private jet, and he flew. He flew us to Las Vegas, just us, no boyfriends, girlfriends, none of us were married yet. Showed us the first episode on the plane on the way to Las Vegas and gave us each $200 to gamble with, which was so thrilling and then made us stop gambling to go eat, which is always irritating to me. But anyway, no. And he took us to Spago and said, pay attention. This is the last time the two can be out in public like this and not be recognized. And I remember everyone going, and I thought, maybe. I don't know. I mean, how does he know? Right. Well, how does he know? Because he's been around and he knows. He knows when he has a success. It's going to work. Yeah. Lisa Kudrow, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was really fun. She's nominated for two Emmys for the final season of the HBO series, The Comeback, and she just finished shooting a sequel to the 1997 film, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer this week is Adam Staniszewski. With Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Mosley.