Kudrow Claims Friends Filming May Have Been Illegal

  has suggested Friends may have been filmed illegally as she recalled the exhausting night shoots.

The actress, 62, played Phoebe Buffay in the iconic sitcom from 1994 to 2004 and told how the shooting schedule was far longer than most shows.

Appearing on the Table Manners podcast, Lisa told of the punishing hours on set which continued even while she was pregnant with her now 27-year-old son Julian.

'Normally, a half hour show took around two, two and a half hours, maybe three to shoot. Ours was six or more hours,' Lisa said.

'God, you had a patient audience,' co-host Lennie Ware said.

'We had two audiences. We had an audience that was waiting outside,' Lisa replied.

'You must have been exhausted,' Lennie said to which Lisa replied: 'Yeah!'

'How old were you when you were doing it then?' Lennie asked.

'30, 31, when we started and I was pregnant during that and I was tired. We were shooting until two in the morning,' Lisa said.

'How does that work with like unions and stuff?' Lennie's daughter and co-host Jessie Ware asked.

'Well, that's an excellent question. How did that happen?' Lisa said, seemingly not knowing the answer herself.

'What about the crew and everything?' Lennie asked.

'They were there at 10 in the morning. I guess everyone got overtime,' Lisa said. 

The actress recently suggested she was treated as an afterthought compared to the rest of her Friends costars.

Lisa said that , , , the late and  eclipsed her in popularity while the series was still on television.

'Nobody cared about me,' she told the Independent. 'There were certain parts of [my talent agency] that just referred to me as "the sixth Friend."'

As Friends became a megahit from its second season, several of her costars leveraged that success to secure choice film roles, but Lisa appeared to think the same kinds of deals eluded her.

'There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have,' she said. 'There was just, like, "Boy, is she lucky she got on that show."'

Despite feeling unappreciated earlier in her career, Lisa has  beyond Friends, including on her HBO series The Comeback.   

Lisa, who co-created the series, was joined by her co-creator, Michael Patrick King, for the interview ahead of its third season.

He appeared astonished to learn that she was not drowning in offers amid the success of Friends, and pointed out that she was also the first member of the cast to win an Emmy, which she received for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1998.

According to Lisa, it was only when she starred as the wife of a psychiatrist treating a mob boss in the 1999 comedy Analyze This, which starred Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal, that she began to get more compelling offers.