Once the golden standard of laugh-out-loud comedy, Friends, was a sitcom that defined an era, offering a window into a time when television and laughter were the best entertainers. Friends did not only entertain, but taught lessons about life that cannot be neatly packaged into a textbook. Many fans even elevated the show to the level of friendship goals, the ultimate benchmark of what real friends should look like. However, a shocking revelation from Lisa Kudrow, the free-spirited Phoebe Buffay, just threw a major plot twist at that ideal.

Phoebe, who embraced friendship without limits like the other five, just reminded fans that the line between the scripted world of Friends and reality can be a whole lot wider than they assumed.

Friends has stayed an evergreen classic, a comfort zone for fans who return to it for everything from holiday nostalgia to guilty pleasure binges after the longest, toughest day. But here is the real question: did the Friends have the same level of friendship once the show was over? It turns out not. On a recent episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast, Lisa Kudrow revealed the entire cast only met once in 17 years between the series finale in 2004 and Friends: the Reunion in 2021.

“We’d only had dinner, the six of us, once before since the show ended,” unveiled Kudrow. Sure, it is a bit ironic to think that the Friends who wrote the book on friendship did not find time to reunite, especially when the world was taking their bond as the ultimate benchmark. But of course, Kudrow does not see it that way. Despite the 10-year gap after the show, when they reunited, she felt they “didn’t miss a beat.” Maybe that is what pledging, “I’ll be there for you” looks like.

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While the Friends revelation may have been a shocker for most, Lisa Kudrow was far from done.

Friends came with a lifetime of lessons, focusing on the intricacies of relationships with a magnifying glass. But Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay and Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani are the only characters who abide by the law of friendship from the start to the end. However, in a separate interview on Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast, Kudrow revealed, “that six-way relationship took some work” but they did it with flying colors.

According to Kudrow, the core cast “worked hard at being friends” and the key was “respectful communication.” No matter how hard it is to wrap one’s head around, Kudrow described herself as the ultimate struggler before sharing how she began re-watching Friends for the first time after Matthew Perry’s passing last year. Although her revisitation may have flipped the script on Friends a little, she made one thing crystal clear: they never lied about always “being there for you.”

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