It’s hard to imagine a more beloved actor than Lisa Kudrow. She is the kind of comedic performer who makes every project better, and seems to do so with ease. Her natural charm and razor-sharp comedic timing have given her job security for nearly forty years. From her mega-hit Friends to cult classic sleepers like The Comeback, Kudrow always hits her mark and our funny bones.
Now, Kudrow is starring in Max’s new horror/comedy, The Parenting, teaming back up with her Clockwatchers co-star Parker Posey as well as Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn, Edie Falco and Brian Cox. While new projects are always exciting, let’s look back at some of the Romy and Michele star’s past roles and how she built her substantial net worth.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Lisa’s fortune is sitting at an impressive $130 million.
How did Lisa Kudrow become famous?
Believe it or not, the world almost missed out on Lisa Kudrow as a beloved actor. In her early life, Lisa planned on pursuing a career as a researcher, earning a degree in biology from Vassar. However, Kudrow has funnyman Jon Lovitz to thank for getting her into comedy. In an interview with the LA Times, she laid it all out, saying, “I grew up with my brother’s best friend, Jon Lovitz. The summer I graduated college is when he got into Saturday Night Live. I told him, ‘I think I want to give acting a try.’ And he said, ‘Great, go to the Groundlings.’” The Groundlings is a famous Los Angeles comedy theater that launched the careers of stars like Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Coolidge and Kristen Wiig, and Lisa was no different. After rising through the ranks at the sketch school, she began auditioning for plays and TV spots, landing bit parts in shows like Cheers, Coach and Mad About You.
After a successful string of guest spots in popular sitcoms and small roles in films, Lisa landed the part of Phoebe Buffay in Friends which launched her into the superstar stratosphere. “All I ever wanted to do was be able to support myself as an actor,” she told TODAY last year, “That was the goal.” Well, it’s safe to say that her goal has been met — and then some.
How much did Lisa Kudrow make from Friends?
If you know Lisa Kudrow from one project, it’s most like the smash-hit sitcom Friends, where she played the loveable goof Phoebe Buffay. Running from 1994-2004, the NBC show is one of the most successful sitcoms in television history, and networks have spent decades trying to recapture the magic that made it a cultural phenomenon. Friends is still the one of the projects that Kudrow gets asked most about, and she continues to have nothing but good things to say. In a 2024 interview with TODAY, she described working alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer and the late Matthew Perry. “I won a lottery being on ‘Friends,’” she told them. “We loved each other. Going to work every day was heaven. It was too good to be true, but it really was.”
The cast’s salary has been a topic of discussion ever since the show began airing, and there’s been a lot of transparency on how much the cast made during the run of the show and beyond. During the first season of Friends, Lisa brought home $22,500 an episode, for a grand total of $540,000 for the season. This was before anyone knew how successful the show would be. $540,000 a year would be a lie changing salary for pretty much everyone, but her earnings only went up from there.
As reported by the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, Kudrow and the cast received a pretty passive pay bump for Season 2, earning $40,000 per episode. By Season 3 that number went up even more, reaching $75,000 an episode which pushed them past $1 million for a single season. By Season 4 the cast received $85,000 an episode and then $100,000 an episode for Season 5. This was back in the days of 24-episode TV seasons, so these paychecks were staggeringly hefty. During Season 6, the cast got another pay bump, totaling $3.125 million for the season (or $125,000 per episode) and for Seasons 7 and 8, Kudrow was raking in $750,000 per episode. That’s quite the raise! But it didn’t stop there, because for the show’s final two seasons, each cast member earned $1 million for a single episode, meaning Kudrow took home $24 million per season. This almost unbelievable salary really speaks to the success of the show and how essential each cast member was to its continued relevance.
Even after the show ended it continued making Kudrow and her co-stars money in syndication. According to USA Today, the show still pulls in $1 billion a year from streaming deals and re-runs, and since the stars make 2% of that income, Kudrow is receiving around $20 million a year from work she completed over 20 years ago. Who knew singing “Smelly Cat” and sipping coffee on a cafe couch could be such a lucrative career?
How much did Lisa Kudrow make from Romy and Michele’s High School Runion?
If Friends is Lisa Kudrow’s best-known work on the small screen, then Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is her best-known work on the big screen. The 1997 film has become a cult classic, but the now-iconic characters were born out of another project entirely, one that holds a special significance for Kudrow. In a recent appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, Lisa revealed that her and Mira Sorvino’s characters first appeared in a play by Robin Schiff, who would later write Romy and Michele script. “That [play] was my first audition, ever, for ‘Airhead No. 2,’ Michele,” she told Barrymore. “We were these minor characters. We were on stage a total of seven minutes, in and out, for the whole play.”
Another juicy bit of behind-the-scenes tea is that the first Romy and Michele script wasn’t meant to go to theaters. “It was a pilot,” said Kudrow. “We were in the pilot, this actress Christie Mellor and I, Romy and Michele. And it was a pilot and it wasn’t very good.” This feels like proof that everything happens for a reason because adding Mira Sorvino into the mix and taking the story to the big screen was the perfect alchemy to create lasting movie magic. Now, almost 30 years later, it’s been reported by The Hollywood Reporter that we’re getting a sequel, something that Kudrow teased during her Drew Barrymore Show appearance, saying, “There’s a script that’s really good.”
