'Friends' star Lisa Kudrow on how the show would be different if filmed today
The cast of "Friends" is often asked how the famous series would be different if it took place now. Lisa Kudrow, who played the inimitable Phoebe Buffay throughout the show's run, said she feels the show would be "completely different."
"It would not be an all-white cast, for sure," she said in a recent interview with The Sunday Times. "I’m not sure what else, but, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong."
The show's creators, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, previously told "Good Morning America" in an interview that if the show had been filmed in 2019, there would definitely be some changes.
"There are certainly things that if I knew then what I know now, I would have done differently," Kauffman told "GMA" last year.
"I think it's true of any show -- that you would look at it through a contemporary lens," Crane added. "You're going to look at things differently, and I think that's inevitable."
Kudrow told The Sunday Times that at the time, "this show thought it was very progressive."
"There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together? We had surrogacy too. It was, at the time, progressive," she said.
In recent years, the show has faced prevalent criticism for containing elements that some perceive as transphobic and fatphobic and for lacking diversity.
Aisha Tyler, the only black actress to have a recurring role on the show, didn't appear until season nine.
David Schwimmer was asked about this criticism during an interview with The Guardian, which was released in January 2020.
"I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of color," he said. "One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part."
But the show did break barriers, he argued.
"The truth is also that [the] show was groundbreaking in its time for the way in which it handled so casually - sex, protected sex, gay marriage and relationships," he said. "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."
He went on, "I feel that a lot of the problem today in so many areas is that so little is taken in context. You have to look at it from the point of view of what the show was trying to do at the time. I’m the first person to say that maybe something was inappropriate or insensitive, but I feel like my barometer was pretty good at that time. I was already really attuned to social issues and issues of equality."
Earlier this year, it was announced that the show's six original stars will come together for a reunion on HBO Max.
"No audience has seen us together since the show was over," Kudrow said. "We will reminisce, talk about what was going on behind the scenes."
"I am really looking forward to it, because I think that I remember things, but then I talk to Matt [LeBlanc] or Jennifer, and they remember everything," she added. "It’s really fun."
