Before high school, Kudrow got a nose job, which gave her face the sleekness of a Brancusi bird. “But I still couldn’t find a boyfriend,” she said. “My father would tell me, ‘You gotta be light and flirty like your sister is.’ I just went, Oh, then it’s not going to happen.” She gave up theatre for biology, thinking she’d become a doctor like her father and her brother, who was in medical school. When she arrived at Vassar College, in upstate New York, she was elated to be among East Coast intellectuals. “Everyone thought I was an idiot, because I was smiling all the time like a California ditz,” she said. She spent her days hunched over lab equipment, and her comedic instincts went dormant. A tough organic-chemistry class knocked her off the premed track, but she took an interest in evolutionary biology, a subject that still fascinates her. As we drove around Tarzana, she lit up talking about CRISPR technology and gene mutations and a study she once read on fossilized birds in Georgia.
But something else was nagging at her. On trips home from Vassar, she’d see actors on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and note how dumb and phony they sounded—the same observation that would later give rise to Valerie Cherish. “All of a sudden, the thought was, O.K., Lisa, when you’re on ‘Letterman,’ just be yourself,” she recalled. “That would blurt into my head, and then I’d think, Wait, why would I be on ‘Letterman’? For an evolutionary-theory idea?” She’d hear ads for sitcoms on the car radio and recoil at the actors’ cornball delivery, imagining herself underplaying the jokes instead. “Lisa, remember to throw it away more,” she recalled thinking. “Wait, why would I need to throw it away? I’m going to pursue evolutionary biology!”
After graduating from Vassar, in 1985, she moved back home, planning to apply to grad school, and started working in her father’s clinic. She held down a job there for eight years, during which she assisted on a study of whether certain headache types correspond to hemispheric dominance in the brain. Earlier research had suggested that sufferers of cluster headaches were more likely to be left-handed; Kudrow’s data disproved this. The results were published in the headache journal Cephalalgia in February, 1994—seven months before “Friends” premièred—under four bylines, including L. V. Kudrow. (Yes, her middle name is Valerie.)
In the meantime, the voice in her head was urging her toward comedy. In 1985, Lovitz was cast on “Saturday Night Live,” and Kudrow’s new proximity to show business intrigued her. She was twenty-two. “I just thought, I don’t want to have any regrets later,” she said. She called Lovitz for advice. He told her, “Go to the Groundlings,” where he had been a member.
When Kudrow informed her parents that she wanted to try acting, she recalled, “they went, ‘Thank God! Maybe this’ll lighten you up, and then you can meet someone.’ ” But when she telephoned the Groundlings, which has a theatre and a comedy school on Melrose Avenue, she was asked when she had last performed and answered, “Junior high.” They sent her to an improv class taught by a woman named Cynthia Szigeti. The first day, Szigeti told everyone to mime lifting a heavy disk and getting angry. “I saw some of these people just indicating anger, like, Grrr,” Kudrow said. “I went, Nuh-uh, that’s horrible. And Cynthia was, like, ‘Great!’ ” Kudrow forced herself to return for the second class, where she spotted a tall red-haired guy doing the disk exercise. “He’s not making a meal out of it—he’s just doing it,” she recalled. “I go, Oh, that’s what commitment is. He’s being it. He’s not overdoing it. So, when that exercise is over, I make a beeline to this guy.” It was Conan O’Brien.
