There are bigger departures from Middle-earth than Time Bandits, a 10-part adventure-fantasy based on a movie about time-travelling dwarfs. The series, which debuted July 24 on Apple TV+, puts a new spin on the beloved film – an ambitious task, given the movie’s bona fides and cult status. The original was written by Gilliam and his fellow Monty Python player Michael Palin, and it starred John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall and Ian Holm.

The new version, created by Waititi and his frequent collaborators Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris, stars Kudrow as the makeshift leader of the bandits, Penelope, who is perturbed by the arrival of a new member, a history-obsessed boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) who accidentally joins them after a portal opens up in his bedroom. Kudrow leads an ensemble cast; Waititi plays the ostensibly benevolent Supreme Being, from whom the bandits have stolen a map of the time portals, and Clement plays Pure Evil, who can’t even say his cosmic nemesis’ name without gagging.

For those who still associate Kudrow, 60, with her most famous role, the daffy Phoebe Buffay of Friends, Time Bandits sees the actress reprise her well-honed comedic talents; she has a knack for reaction shots and unexpected line deliveries, and for playing off blonde Valley Girl stereotypes. (She grew up in the Valley, in Tarzana.) Her characters can be as cutting as they are quirky, and just as memorable as Phoebe. See: the ditzy-but-creative Michele in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, or the thirsty former sitcom star Valerie Cherish in HBO’s The Comeback.

It was partly that legacy of indelible characters that director Olivia Wilde had in mind when she approached Kudrow about a role in her 2019 high school comedy Booksmart. Wilde said she was honoured that Kudrow said yes.

“People feel excited to see what she’s going to make because she doesn’t need to work so when she makes something it feels like she chooses only the most interesting things,” Wilde said.

Fantasy, though – dodging mortal danger, running from monsters, leaping through tears in the space-time continuum – was new territory for Kudrow. It was also a welcome change. When Waititi reached out about Time Bandits, Kudrow had been looking for something that was pure fun.

The anxiety from the pandemic was then still lingering, and every new show she watched seemed to be about some sort of Armageddon.

“That is the last thing I wanted to watch,” she said. She didn’t want to act in anything like that either. Time Bandits seemed to fit the bill.

“This is pure fantasy,” she said. “It’s not even much commentary on anything.”

Apple picked up the rights back in 2018, with Waititi signing on the next year. But Kudrow didn’t come on board until about two years ago, when the show was already in preproduction. At that time her character was still a man named Randall, after the Time Bandits’ leader in the film, played by David Rappaport. (In Gilliam’s version all the Time Bandits were played by people with dwarfism; the change to the makeup of the group has faced some criticism, including by the granddaughter of one of the original stars.)

They had been struggling to find the right person for the role despite a global search. “We were trying to put this cast together; it was a bit of a panic,” Clement said.

The creators were plenty acquainted with Friends – Waititi once wore a “Smelly Cat” T-shirt in front of Kudrow – but it was her work in The Comeback that they believed made her right for Time Bandits. In The Comeback, Valerie is so desperate to regain her fame that she agrees to do a reality show about her life. It’s a brilliant performance of insecurity, which was just what the boss bandit needed. Penelope is a textbook overcompensator.

“I think we both found it funny the idea of Lisa – knowing her from her work in The Comeback – as a constantly frustrated person,” Clement said of himself and Waititi. They loved the idea of “seeing someone like that trying to organise heists with a bunch of people who don’t know how to do it”.

“We’re just lucky she came and saved us and did a great job,” he added. “And now it’s hard to imagine someone else in that part.”

The original film debuted when Kudrow was nearing the end of high school, and while she found it funny at the time, it wasn’t a touchstone. For her, the appeal of joining the series was mainly the chance to work with Clement, Morris and Waititi, whose best-known collaboration is probably the FX comedy What We Do in the Shadows, about vampire roommates in Staten Island, based on Clement and Waititi’s 2015 film.

Kudrow did wonder, initially, how her style would fit with the Time Bandits tone.

“I do what I do,” she said. “It felt like, Is this a little more Python-esque? Can I do that? I don’t know if I can do that.”

She didn’t have to worry. Morris told me she was a “joke genius”. Clement said that some of his favourite lines were improvised by Kudrow, including the quip “Well, this was a colossal waste of time travel”.

While some actors balk about letting their best-known early roles define them, it doesn’t bother Kudrow that fans still associate her with Phoebe. That performance was an outgrowth of her own comedic sensibilities, developed with Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings and gleaned initially from her love of Lucy and Ethel on I Love Lucy.

“A sort of muttering and overreaction to some things is what’s funny to me, so there’s a lot of me in Phoebe anyway,” she said.

Kudrow also appreciates the attachment people have to sitcoms. While shooting Time Bandits, Kudrow watched episodes of 30 Rock, Everybody Loves Raymond and The Big Bang Theory as palate cleansers at night. After the death in October of her Friends co-star Matthew Perry, she began watching marathons of the show as a comfort mechanism, focusing not so much on herself but rather on the rest of the cast.

“That’s been really helpful,” she said.

Although she has been watching her old show a little less these days, she still lingers when it happens to be on, and no one is home to catch her. She found herself recently watching the episode where Phoebe gets married, one she had never seen before.

“She had the most genuinely happy smile on her face,” Kudrow said of Phoebe. “So innocent, so hopeful and so happy that it made me tear up. Which makes me feel like an insane person too.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times

Written by: Esther Zuckerman

Photographs by: Amy Harrity

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