Lisa Kudrow is speaking out on a controversial conversation surrounding Friends.
Kudrow, best known for playing Phoebe Buffay on the beloved ‘90s sitcom, interviewed with The Times this week to speak about the latter-day criticism the show has faced for having a predominantly white cast, including Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer.
With a reunion special coming to HBO soon, the British newspaper poked Kudrow's brain about what she imagines Friends would look like today.
"Oh, it'd be completely different," the 56-year-old told the outlet. "Well, it would not be an all-white cast, for sure."
"I'm not sure what else, but, to me, [Friends] should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong,” Kudrow added in the show’s defense.
Even while acknowledging the show’s abundance of predominantly white characters, Kudrow insisted Friends had been “progressive” for its time.
“There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together,” Kudrow explained. “We had surrogacy, too. It was, at the time, progressive.”
Kudrow isn’t the only alum from the show to address the diversity conversation. Schwimmer had similar sentiments when asked about the subject in January.
In response to younger viewers calling the show “problematic” for its lack of diversity and alleged exploitation of LGBTQ characters, Schwimmer simply said, “I don’t care.”
"The truth is also that show was groundbreaking in its time for the way in which it handled so casually sex, protected sex, gay marriage and relationships," he told the Guardian. "The pilot of the show was my character's wife left him for a woman and there was a gay wedding, of my ex and her wife, that I attended."
"I feel that a lot of the problem today in so many areas is that so little is taken in context," he added. "You have to look at it from the point of view of what the show was trying to do at the time."
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