Lisa Kudrow recalls disastrous first big TV audition: ‘I scared Garry Shandling’

‘I’m walking out down the hall, and I look back, and it’s Garry Shandling, looking to make sure I’m gone’

Lisa Kudrow has opened up about a disastrous audition early in her career.

The actor, who would find success on the hit Nineties sitcom Friends shortly after, was applying for a role in Garry Shandling’s seminal HBO comedy The Larry Sanders Show in the early 1990s.

Speaking to Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kudrow reflected on the incident.

“Oh, God. I had a bad experience,” she said. “It was all my own fault. I got to audition for Larry Sanders. [One of the best shows] ever. Garry Shandling, who was a comedy god, to me, to everybody.

“I was so excited. I was like, ‘oh, this is perfect’, because I did have this dry sense of humour.”

She explained that she would make quips all the time, picking up on any “bump in language” from other people, such as when waiters referred to the plural “we” to refer to themselves.

“At the audition, I think I was doing a similar thing. The casting director or something said, ‘Alright, now we’re going to do this scene.’”

Gesturing at Shandling, she joked: “Oh, OK. Should it just be he and I?”

“No tell, no smile. And then Garry said, ‘No, no, we will read it together,’” she recalled. “And we did.”

“Even Garry didn’t get it,” laughed Kimmel.

Kudrow is best known for her role as Phoebe Buffay in ‘Friends' (Getty Images)

“They didn’t know me!” added Kudrow. “I forgot! So I’m walking out down the hall, and I look back, and it’s Garry Shandling, looking to make sure I’m gone. He said, ‘We’ll be in touch, we really will.’ I scared Garry Shandling.”

The role in Larry Sanders, of talent booker Paula, eventually went to Jeneane Garafolo.