Lisa Kudrow had addressed the lack of diversity on Friends, saying the show's creators had "no business" writing about the stories of people of color.
The 59-year-old, who played Phoebe, the eccentric busker and masseuse, on the iconic sitcom, was recently interviewed by US news site the Daily Beast, where she spoke about her time on the show.
Kudrow was asked about her feelings on the show's lack of POC representation, to which the actress replied: "Well, I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college. And for shows especially, when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know."
She added that the show's creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, "have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of colour."
In a 2020 interview with the Sunday Times, Kudrow said she believed the show should be regarded as a "time capsule". She also stated it would be "completely different" if made today, and "would not be an all-white cast, for sure."
Those statements came after the popular show received a series of criticisms about the show's pattern of transphobic, sexist, and racist jokes, per NME.
Kauffman and Crane, however, appear to have different attitudes toward the lack of POC characters on the hit-show. They have taken the criticisms seriously and been rather vocal about the show's lack of representation.
"I mean we’ve always encouraged people of diversity in our company, but I didn’t do enough and now all I can think about is, what can I do?" Kauffman said at the ATX Television Festival in 2020.
Also speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Kauffman admitted she was "embarrassed" about not understanding the reasons why the show was criticised in the past.
"I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years [...] Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror," Kauffman added.
Friends executive producer and director, Kevin Bright, also weighed in - stating in 2021 that he "never intended to have an all-white cast," per the Hollywood Reporter.
Despite receiving backlash on Friends' lack of representation, Bright did comment on the fact that the sitcom did feature a lesbian wedding, something that had never been done before on television.
"That’s a combination of astounded we got away with it and so happy we were the ones to do it. When the show gets hammered about a lack of diversity, I like that episode also to be remembered as doing something that nobody else had done before: a lesbian wedding on television," Bright said to the Hollywood Reporter.
"I would have figured that NBC would have been so pressured by the middle of the country that they would have shut it down — and they didn’t. And we got Candace Gingrich to be the priest," Bright added.
