Do You Know Why Phoebe Had An Identical Twin Sister? The Reason Is Pretty Funny!

Phoebe Buffay’s identical twin sister Ursula was always quite a weird character in the series. The few times we saw her she would try her best to make Phoebe’s life harder like the time she took her name to take part in low-budget porn movies.

Phoebe and Ursula never bonded and she never became a meaningful part of the plot.

But there is actually a really specific reason to why NBC worked Ursula into the storyline and it all had to do with Kudrow’s other job on “Mad About You”.

In “Mad About You” Lisa played Ursula Buffay, who was a waitress in NYC.  And since both shows were on NBC and aired back to back, producers had to come up with a way to explain why they were seeing the same person with different names in two different shows. So they came up with a pretty genius solution.

Also Kudrow didn’t want to give up the role in “Mad About You” for “Friends” as back then no one really knew the show was going to be so big.

The role of Ursula also helped Lisa when she was auditioning for Phoebe!

Knowing all of this it actually seems like such a smart move and even made the show a bit more realistic.