Lisa Kudrow has left us crying in poor after revealing the eye-watering amount that the cast of Friends earns in residuals every year. Hint: it’s a f**k tonne.
The actress opened up about her ongoing earnings from the hit 90s sitcom — in which she played the forever-iconic Phoebe Buffay — in an interview with The Times of London.
When asked why Kudrow and her Friends co-stars earn “£15 million (AUD $28 million) a year from repeat fees”, the actress seemingly verified the figure by going on to answer the question.
Kudrow not correcting the jaw-dropping figure when it was read out to her was all the confirmation folks needed to take the number and run with it, particularly since it’s widely known that Friends was an extremely well-paying gig towards the end of its 10-season run.
In Hollywood terms, residuals are the compensation payments made to actors whenever a TV show is reused, rerun, or sold after its initial release.
In the case of Friends — arguably the biggest sitcom in history — all those reruns, in the more than two decades since the finale aired, have evidently added up. And for the cast, they’ve stacked up to a truly innumerable number of Central Perk lattes.
The residuals are on top of what Kudrow and the gang were paid during their time working on the show, with the main cast starting off on $22,500 (AUD $31,000) per episode in season one to a whopping $1 million (AUD $1.4 million) per episode in seasons nine and 10.
I’m not even going to bother adjusting those salaries for inflation because my wallet simply couldn’t bear it.
As for why Kudrow reckons the cast earned every penny, she put it down to the chemistry between herself and Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry.
“After Matthew died I watched the show again,” Kudrow told The Times. “For the first time, I truly appreciated just how great it was. I felt I did OK, but Jennifer and Courteney? Amazing. David and Matt? They had me laughing so hard. And then Matthew — he was just beyond us all,” she added.
When you put it like that, I guess Friends really is priceless.
Lead images: Getty and NBC
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