The 61-year-old actress shot to fame when she took on the role of Phoebe Buffay in the NBC sitcom and 30 years after she first starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, and Courteney Cox as a group of twentysomethings in New York City, she has admitted that she can understand why the show continues to resonate with new generations.
"I'm not amazed because it's good and it's familiar," she told PageSix.
"There's a subconscious nostalgia [for younger generations] for something they don't have, which is in-person connections and relations. And that's always been at the heart of every successful show."
The series initially ran over the course of 10 seasons from 1994 until 2004, but now streams on Netflix and is considered to be a billion-dollar franchise thanks to endless reruns and merchandise lines.
Kudrow says the interaction between the six main characters is the reason that fans around the globe are "still attached" to them all these years later, and believes the sitcom has all the other magical ingredients that synchronise together to make a worthwhile program.
"That's why people get attached to them and then if it's funny, there [are] good performances, good jokes, that's a bonus and Friends had all that," she said.
Many people had raised concerns at the time that the show was nothing more than a"bunch of young people sitting on a couch talking", she said.
"That's not my problem. I'm just in it, but yes it was a show," she said.