Lisa Kudrow Got Nose Job at 16, Was "Hideous" Before Plastic Surgery

Publish date: 2024-06-04

No regrets! Lisa Kudrow went under the knife at the young age of 16 — and she's glad she did it. In a new interview in the November/December issue of The Saturday Evening Post, the 50-year-old Friends alum opens up about her decision to get a nose job as a teenager and her struggles making friends in school.

"That was life altering," the Los Angeles, Calif. tells the magazine about getting a rhinoplasty. "I went from, in my mind, hideous, to not hideous. I did it the summer before going to a new high school. So there were plenty of people who wouldn't know how hideous I looked before. That was a good, good, good change."

Kudrow's surgery occurred after enduring a very difficult time in junior high when her two best friends decided they no longer wanted to be friends with her. "That happened in seventh grade when we moved from sixth grade to a new school. So they knew some people, and I didn't. Eventually they just got tired of me being a tag-along," she shares. "They said, 'For your own good, you need to see what would happen if we weren't here.' It was really brutal. Very hard."

"It was just mean." she adds. "And all of junior high felt upside down to me. It was not, like, the nice people who were popular; it wasn't the most entertaining people — it was the meanest people who were popular."

Perhaps unknowingly, Kudrow used some of those old feelings to play the beloved misfit Phoebe Buffay in the 1994 hit TV series, Friends.

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"She was basically a ditzy girl who lived in a happier reality than everybody else, because everything was so gloomy around her. That's what I decided," the actress explains of her character. "And she was fearless and unapologetic. Now on Twitter or Facebook I see young girls saying, 'I identify with Phoebe because I'm different too.' That's nice, to think that people who don't feel they fit in perfectly well can relate to that character."

Kudrow currently has recurring role as Congresswoman Josephine Marcus opposite Kerry Washington's Olivia Pope character in the ABC hit series Scandal.

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