“She deserves to be this happy,” Kudrow said of her character, Phoebe Buffay

Lisa Kudrow in ‘Friends’ in 2003. Photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

Lisa Kudrow is sharing the episode of Friends that made her all misty-eyed when she finally saw it.

On the most recent episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast, the No Good Deed star mentioned that she’d recently started watching the beloved NBC sitcom for the first time, after years of resisting.

“God forbid, if anyone walked into my house and saw me watching my show, I’d be mortified,” Kudrow joked.

“There’s episodes I’ve never seen. I mean I was at the table read. I don’t know what the rewrites were for the other stories, you know?” she continued. “There are episodes I just never saw, and still haven’t because I’m still deciding how to work my way through it. It’s like there’s a certain amount of anxiety around watching it.”

Paul Rudd and Lisa Kudrow in ‘Friends’ in 2004.NBCU Photo Bank

Kudrow added that she’s afraid of what her “take-away” might be from certain episodes. She cited the season 10 episode in which her character, Phoebe Buffay, marries boyfriend Mike (Paul Rudd).

“I actually — when Phoebe got married, and she’s walking down the aisle and has this huge smile on her face, I teared up because she was so happy,” Kudrow, 61, recalled. “She was so just, like, honestly happy, and it was just — I don’t know. It was really touching to me. Like, she deserves to be this happy.”

Paul Rudd and Lisa Kudrow in ‘Friends’ in 2002.Danny Feld/NBCU Photo Bank

Earlier in their conversation, Ferguson and Kudrow noted that the character is in many ways tragic, coming from a broken home and having experience homelessness — not to mention her strained relationship with “evil” twin sister Ursula. Yet Kudrow managed to make Phoebe one of the sunniest and funniest of the show’s oddballs.

“To me, what was funny — what would be funny — about that is a person who just treats it all like, you know, it’s not just me. Can’t take it personally. It happens to everybody,” Kudrow said of her approach to the character.

Friends is available to stream in full on Max.