Lisa Kudrow may be best known for playing Phoebe Buffay on Friends, but her latest project has her tackling a different classic — one of the best time travel movies, Terry Gilliam's fantasy adventure Time Bandits. The 1981 movie has been reimagined as a new Apple TV+ series and comes from the brilliant minds of Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris. Ahead of its July 24 premiere on the 2024 TV schedule, Kudrow sat down with CinemaBlend to talk about the series, and she said working with the talented trio was “heaven.”
Taika Waititi has made some truly wonderful television over the past few years, producing series like What We Do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs and Our Flag Means Death. Now he’s tackling the adventures of the rag-tag group of thieves — led by Lisa Kudrow’s Penelope — who travel through time and space, begrudgingly picking up an 11-year-old history buff along the way. When our own Nick Venable asked Kudrow what it was like to work with Waititi and Clement on Time Bandits, she said:
Yeah, it was heaven. And you have to add Iain Morris into that too. I mean, just from day one of shooting, it was feel free to add whatever you want and improvise and stuff. And then Jemaine would come on to the set and say to different actors, ‘What if you said this, and what if…’ just changing the lines. It was so fun.
That really does sound like the ideal situation for an actor. The Friends veteran enjoyed that Time Bandits was a collaborative effort, where the actors were given the space to experiment but also could lean on the comedic expertise of the creators. The actress continued:
It was just, ‘Oh, and now let's do one where you're a little nicer to Kevin, just in case it's too harsh. We'll have to see how it looks.’ And to me, that's the whole point of having a camera and an editor, you know what I mean? And having a story and then you can actually fashion it to be exactly what you need it to be. Yeah, it was great. It was just fun. It was just this fun ‘let's all discover it’ thing, but they clearly had an outline and a script and the idea of it, and I just did what was fun.
Lisa Kudrow clearly had a lot of trust in the people around her, and having seen the first couple of episodes of Time Bandits (available to stream now with an Apple TV+ subscription), it’s funny to hear her specifically mention the way Penelope talks to Kevin (relative newcomer Kal-El Tuck in a wonderfully precocious role). The pre-teen proves to be as helpful to the bandits as he is disapproving of their plight, which leads to some hilarious exchanges between Kudrow and Tuck’s characters.
The trio behind the Time Bandits series and Lisa Kudrow have all proven themselves in the comedy world, and the synergy that she described between the cast and crew makes it sound like it was a great situation for all involved.
The first two episodes of Time Bandits’s 10-episode first season are streaming now on Apple TV+ — one of the best streaming services to subscribe to — with two new episodes dropping each Wednesday.
