Lisa Kudrow Says She ‘Would’ve Quit’ Acting if She Hadn’t Met Conan O’Brien: ‘We Became Best Friends’

Lisa Kudrow would have quit acting if it weren’t for Conan O’Brien, the “Friends” and “Time Bandits” star told the “Smartless” podcast Monday.

Speaking with hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, Kudrow reflected on her early days pursuing the performing arts in Los Angeles after graduating pre-med from Vassar College. Struggling to find her way into comedy acting because she found improv to be so “embarrassing,” the Emmy winner shared that meeting O’Brien in an improv class stopped her from quitting altogether.

“I would’ve quit if not for Conan,” Kudrow said before relaying the story of how they met in a pre-Groundlings improv class with Cynthia Seghetti.

“It was nuts. I couldn’t take Groundlings classes because they wouldn’t let me because I hadn’t had enough experience with anything. So they sent me to Cynthia Seghetti, an improv teacher at the Coronet. And I went to the first class and thought, ‘Oh no, these are not my people and I can’t do this.’ Commit? I don’t know what that means. And they’re all embarrassing me with their like, you know, spaceball — an emotional adjustment like ‘grrr.’ I went, ‘I can’t do this. This isn’t fun. I think I’m out of acting forever.'”

But she brought herself to one last class before throwing in the towel — “You committed to this, just go,” she told herself — and while sitting and watching other students mime a warm-up exercise, her eye was drawn to a “really tall redhead guy.”

“I was a little late, and everyone was up there. I was like, ‘No, no I don’t want to break the flow, I’ll just sit here and watch and die.’ And they were lifting a disc or something. Mime. And so one of them was doing it, and it was Conan, this really tall redhead guy, is lifting the disc, and when he’s angry, he’s just kind of angry and he’s just really lifting a disc or throwing this spaceball without too much.”

She recalled Seghetti praising O’Brien’s “commitment.”

“And I went, ‘Oh, that’s commitment. It’s not embarrassing, you’re just really doing it.’ And so I thought, ‘OK, that guy.’ So I made sure I made a b-line to him, I said, ‘Hi, I’m Lisa. That was really good.’ And he said, ‘I’m Conan.’ And we became best friends from that moment on.” 

Kudrow and O’Brien reminisced on their decades-spanning relationship just earlier this month on Team CoCo’s podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” and O’Brien remembered also feeling out of place at that Coronet improv class and being equally as drawn to Kudrow as she was to him.

“I go to this improv class, and I notice the person who I thought was the funniest, most interesting person in the room, Lisa, and I start talking to her, and she’s just graduated from Vassar, and she’s pre-med and no one in her family’s done this.”

“Right, and your mom went to Vassar, that was another thing, like, ‘Oh, my mom went there,'” Kudrow said.

“But it just felt like, well, wait a minute, she’s doing this, and she seemed very confident and, like, well, yes, this is what I’m going to do,” O’Brien said of how Kudrow’s apparent confidence in her passion bolstered his own.

“Well, I was confident once I saw you in the class and I figured out what to do based on what you were doing, because I didn’t understand the terminology at all. Like, ‘Commit!’ I don’t know what that means, commit?” Kudrow said, echoing her conversation with “Smartless.” “But you didn’t see me do anything. I made a b-line for you, right after you did the, you know, spaceball or lift-a-disc.”

“All this embarrassing stuff that you do,” O’Brien admitted of the warm-up routine.

“But you did it with commitment! You weren’t making a meal out of everything, you were just doing it, and you just looked like you were actually lifting a disc or you actually were throwing a ball,” Kudrow said.

Watch a clip from Kudrow’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” interview below, and listen to her full “Smartless” interview here.

Kudrow’s latest project, “Time Bandits” on Apple TV+, airs news episodes every Wednesday.

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