Lisa Kudrow On "Who Do You Think You Are" @LisaKudrow

Emmy Award-winning actress Lisa Kudrow warmed our hearts as Phoebe Buffay on “Friends” for years. Now, she returns as executive producer in the second season of NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are.” Kudrow is extending the family tree branch by revealing the past and helping to rewrite the family history of others.

The series follows some of today’s most-beloved and iconic celebrities as they embark on personal journeys of self-discovery to trace their family trees. From the trenches of the Civil War to the shores of the Caribbean, and from the valleys of Virginia to the island nations of Australia and Ireland, each episode will reveal surprising, inspiring and sometimes tragic stories that are often linked to events in American and international history.

In a conversation, Kudrow revealed a bit of her family history and the successful discoveries of actress and performer, Vanessa Williams.

Who Do You Think You Are – Fridays (8-9 p.m. ET) on NBC

Lisa, as the executive producer of the series, why were you so interested in tracing the ancestral roots on each guest and who do you think you were before tracing your roots?

Lisa Kudrow: Before tracing or discovering this – that Holocaust story, I knew there was something there and I was too afraid to explore it because I thought it would be too overwhelming. And – also you don’t want to – there was no survival story out of that except – I didn’t think. I think sometimes you don’t want to look at that because you don’t want to start thinking of yourself or your family as just victims. My father had spent years going to the Mormon temple here in LA and getting a lot of documents and made an extensive family tree. But again, that’s mostly names and dates, which is great. But to me what’s fascinating and what drew me to this show when I first saw it was that it’s not just names and dates. You can actually understand a little – a lot about what your family was going through and what was happening in their world that made them make some important decisions that changed the course of your lineage.

It’s about people having information and knowing what a tough planet this is and what people are capable of doing to each other in the worst of ways. And then finding a relative that we thought for sure was dead. I learned that there was a lot of Antisemitism and people could survive the Holocaust, survive even a concentration camp, go back to their home, and then get killed. And we thought that’s what happened to my relative and he was alive and well. And that was really inspiring to me. That it gave me great hope that sometimes things do work out. That’s great.

This show really motivated me to become a producer because I wanted to see if we can do it over here in the U.S.

As a successful actress, how do you compare your work as a producer and to being an actress and will you be doing more behind-the-scenes work?

Lisa Kudrow: I’m definitely doing behind-the-scenes stuff for Who Do You Think You Are. This has been really fulfilling. To be able to bring a show like this to a network like NBC who was brave enough, I think, to show it. This is the big honor that I can be involved in a show like this, which I think is entertaining and informative.

We produced the show because I was already onboard as a producer. I was the first one to shoot, so we were learning a lot of technical things, and it was best to learn it on my shoot. It was really valuable. It was really valuable and that’s a whole other part of what that trip was for me as a producer and then actually being there going through the journey. And it’s really too bad the stuff that has to be cut out because we only have 42 minutes. But there was more in Vanessa’s episode that I was so sorry to lose. Like where William A. Fields was from what plantation and possibly that he may have learned to read. And they were breaking the law by teaching him. There were so many other things that I think are so interesting, but at least you get to have that information. I had wished we had more time to really investigate the Carl side because there weren’t records, but you can keep digging and keep looking just to see if we can fill out lineage. Because it’s a whole other experience. I think it’s also important to see the conditions the people were raised in, how they were parented, if you can draw any conclusions from that and then to see how that gets passed along — what a person’s response to their environment, how that gets passed along to the next generation. I think that’s very real.

I also loved when Spike Lee found out that his ancestor was made to work in a munitions factory to make guns for the Confederates to kill the people who were coming to enforce Emancipation. That was a good one.

Why did you select Vanessa Williams for this season?

Lisa Kudrow: There are a lot of reasons why, we’re lucky to have Vanessa Williams do the show. Vanessa’s intellectually curious. She’s a fan of history. When someone’s invested in learning and finding out what’s important here — not what kind of information necessarily. Everybody knows Vanessa and it is a TV show and we do want people to watch it, so a lot of people are going to want to tune in to see what Vanessa finds.

It takes researchers six weeks to many months to get all the research. And it depends on what country you have to get records from and what time of year it is and they’re on vacation and they’re from closed from us, you know. That’s the kind of thing that holds up the records. And then with the African-American stories, there’s just trying to find information, I think we got really lucky with Vanessa’s because it is extraordinary — the documentation of both of her paternal great-grandfathers, so that was fantastic. But usually there’s that wall of slavery where it’s almost impossible. There are no surnames and, you know, slaves aren’t listed by name. So it can be almost impossible to get records. And when you personalize history with these stories then it has so much more impact. And you can see Vanessa finding out all of this information, all these things, and considering what life must’ve been life if these were the circumstances.

One thing is willingness, because it is a commitment. And then I think I said before it works out best when someone like Vanessa who is intellectually curious and just genuinely interested in what the information is going to be whether someone – not judging the information but just taking it in, because that is what’s really important.

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