Actor Lisa Kudrow, 62, on the Best Part of Getting Older

Friends star Lisa Kudrow, 62, has spent three decades in Hollywood refusing to let the industry ignore her. In a conversation with actor Lily Tomlin, 86, recently published in Interview magazine, she opens up about what kept her going.

Kudrow is closing out The Comeback, the HBO series she cocreated, cowrote and starred in across three seasons and lasted more than 20 years. The third and final season, now streaming on HBO Max, finds her character, Valerie Cherish, starring in the first sitcom written entirely by artificial intelligence. Kudrow told Tomlin it’s a trilogy finished on her own terms.

Adults 50-plus spend more than $10 billion annually on streaming and movies, according to an AARP Movies for Grownups survey released in January. The study underscores the market potential in telling stories by and about people 50 and up.

Lisa Kudrow is Valerie Cherish in the third season of “The Comeback.”

Courtesy Erin Simkin/HBO

Tomlin asked Kudrow what she learned at 30 that she wished she had known at 25. Kudrow’s answer: “Don’t confuse people liking your work with them liking you. And don’t wait to get permission to like yourself, because you’ll need that. You’re all you’ve got.”

Tomlin agreed: “We’re conditioned to think it’s arrogant if you like yourself, and it’s not. It’s a requirement.” Kudrow concurred. 

“For stability,” she said. 

Kudrow grew up in Tarzana, California, earned a degree in biology at Vassar College and was headed toward a career in science before she started doing improv at The Groundlings, a Los Angeles sketch comedy theater. She landed the role of Phoebe Buffay on Friends in 1994 and won a Primetime Emmy Award for it in 1998.

After Friends ended in 2004, Kudrow and writer Michael Patrick King built The Comeback, a satire about a woman who refuses to accept that her moment has passed — because to Kudrow, “the funniest thing is someone who has no idea that they’re operating in an alternate reality,” she told Interview.

(From left) Lisa Kudrow and Chris Isaak in an episode of “Friends,” which ran until 2004.

Warner Brothers/Courtesy Everett Collection

The show got low ratings and was canceled after its first season. But Kudrow didn’t flinch.

“When Michael called to tell me, I didn’t feel bad. It wasn’t my mistake,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in a March 2026 digital cover story. “I felt really great about what we had done and knew that we couldn’t have done better. Someone is making a mistake, and I knew it wasn’t ours. I just thought, Well, I’ll do other things, and maybe someday they’ll change their mind. Ten years later, they did.”

The Comeback returned in 2014 to critical acclaim.