Lisa Kudrow

Lisa Kudrow (born 1963) played Phoebe Buffay across ten seasons of Friends — winning an Emmy and becoming one of the most recognizable comedians of her generation — and went on to acclaimed turns in The Comeback and Web Therapy, a series she co-created. In late 2024 she became one of the first major stars to publicly criticize a peer’s AI-assisted film.

“An endorsement for AI”

On the Armchair Expert podcast in November 2024, Kudrow took aim at Here — Robert Zemeckis’s film that used generative AI de-aging tools from Metaphysic to make Tom Hanks and Robin Wright appear decades younger in real time on set. “All I got from that was, this is an endorsement for AI,” she said, noting the actors could watch playback of their younger selves instantly.

Her deeper worry was structural: if studios can synthesize bankable stars at any age, why develop new ones? “Forget actors, what about up-and-coming actors? They’ll just be licensing and recycling” established names, she argued — and beyond performers, she asked what work would remain for the makeup artists, VFX crews, and other craftspeople whose jobs the technology absorbs: “What work will there be for human beings? Then what?”

The comments drew wide coverage precisely because they crossed a Hollywood line — publicly framing a beloved colleague’s passion project as a Trojan horse for the technology her union had just struck over.