How Lisa Kudrow Feels About Friends’ Diversity Issue

Lisa Kudrow is standing up for some of her Friends. 

In recent years, the lack of diversity on Friends—where Kudrow starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc from 1994 to 2004—has been called into question. 

Created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane, who are both white, Kudrow argued it would have been disingenuous for them to write from a perspective other than their own.

“I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college,” the actress told The Daily Beast Aug. 10. “And for shows especially, when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color.”

Brandeis is a private university with an emphasis on liberal arts outside Boston.

Kudrow recognized, however, that not enough was being done to mentor creatives of color, adding, “I think at that time, the big problem that I was seeing was, ‘Where’s the apprenticeship?'”