I felt ‘self-conscious’ with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox on ‘Friends’

Lisa Kudrow didn’t always feel like the star she is.

The actress shot to fame on the 1990s sitcom “Friends.” Still, she couldn’t help but compare herself to co-stars Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston.

During a recent interview on the podcast “Podcrushed,” the “Easy A” actress, 59, recalled feeling “self-conscious” during costume fittings with her castmates back in the day — because clothes seemed to look better on them.

“Seeing myself on the show and seeing myself in clothes and seeing Courtney and Jennifer, I thought, ‘Oh, they know tailoring so they can discuss it with the costume designer about where exactly to take it in,’ ” she told “Podcrushed” hosts Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari.

Kudrow played the iconically kooky Phoebe Buffay for 10 seasons on the NBC comedy from 1994 to 2004.

“I’m not trying to say I was overweight,” the mother of one added. “I was not. I just had no idea of the actual shape of my body.”

As Kudrow reached her 40s, she learned to accept her body for what it was. “It’s OK. This is just what I look like,” she conceded.

The “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” star reiterated that her goal in Hollywood was not to become a Marilyn Monroe-type bombshell.

She went on to explain that she had initially hoped to establish herself as a “character actress” in show business. “You’re not going for romantic comedies, romantic lead — you don’t do that,” she stated of herself. “That’s not a fun role for you anyway, so knock it off. It’s OK, you can look fine as you are.”

Kudrow then explained how the pressure to look a certain way in Tinseltown is all “in your own head.”

“You’re doing that to yourself,” she said. “No one needs you to be Tom Cruise or as famous as Tom Cruise. For me, at that time, it was Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan. No one is actually requiring that of me.”

This isn’t the first time Kudrow touched upon body image issues while starring on the sitcom. She revealed in a 2019 episode of the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast that she had suffered from body dysmorphia.

“You see yourself on TV and it’s that ‘Oh my God, I’m just a mountain of a girl’ … I’m already bigger than Courteney and Jennifer, like my bones feel bigger,” she said.

The Emmy winner admitted that the desire to be thin for the camera nearly consumed her — literally.

“I just felt like this mountain of a woman next to them,” Kudrow said. “Unfortunately for a woman, if you’re underweight, you look good. When I was too thin I was sick all the time, a cold, sinus infection, I was always sick.”

She’s since found her way behind the camera, as executive producer of “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a newly re-launched reality series that dives deep into the ancestral roots of celebrities.