Friends alumni still earn a fortune every year thanks to the series

A jackpot thanks to “residuals”, as Lisa Kudrow explains today.

More than twenty years after the end of the cult series, the jackpot continues to fall for Ross, Rachel and the others…

Invited to go behind the financial scenes of Friends by the English newspaper The Times, Lisa Kudrow confirmed what remains one of the most astonishing figures in Hollywood: the main actors would still earn around 20 million dollars per year.

This amount comes from “residuals”, income paid to actors each time a series is rebroadcast, sold or streamed. And with Friends, omnipresent on platforms, the machine has never stopped. Kudrow has fun following this impressive jackpot:

“It’s deserved… because Phoebe Buffay is so awesome isn’t she?” she jokes, before acknowledging a simpler reality: the series remains incredibly popular.

The actress also explains that she rediscovered the series after the death of Matthew Perry in 2023.

“Before, I only saw what I did wrong or what I could have done better. But for the first time, I really realized how great it was.”

She takes the opportunity to salute her partners: Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox are “incredible”, while David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc make her “laugh out loud”. But it’s Perry who garners the actress’ highest praise: “Honestly, he was the best, he was above all of us.”

If the actors still earn so much today, it is also thanks to a rare collective strategy at the time: the cast had negotiated their salaries together, all six of them together in production, and throughout the ten seasons, going from $22,500 per episode (season 1) to $1 million each in the last seasons. A maneuver which made Kudrow, Aniston and Cox the highest paid actresses on television at the time, and which continues to pay off today!