Lisa Kudrow Brings Her Daffy Charm to ‘Time Bandits’

Lisa Kudrow doesn’t particularly like to travel. Raised and based in Los Angeles, she mostly hasn’t had to. Even the quintessential New York sitcom “Friends” was shot in Burbank.

“I like L.A.,” she said in a video call from her home there. “I guess vacations are nice, but I feel like I live in a vacation spot so, where am I going? I can watch a video.”

But when the filmmaker Taika Waititi sent her a message on Instagram asking if she would come to New Zealand to star in a series-length adaptation of the 1981 Terry Gilliam movie “Time Bandits,” she said yes. It was a six-month commitment, but in one of the few places on Earth Kudrow had always wanted to visit.

And, as she said with a laugh, “No one’s putting me in a Hobbit movie.”

Fair enough, though there are bigger departures from Middle-earth than “Time Bandits,” a 10-part adventure-fantasy based on a movie about time traveling dwarfs. The series, which debuted Wednesday 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 the likes of 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.