Lisa Kudrow (2022 interview) on possible Friends movie & diversity
A 2022 interview with Lisa Kudrow has been widely quoted, so I went to the original article (well worth reading), available here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/lisa-kudrow-is-ready-for-another-comeback
Kudrow talks about how she envisions a hypothetical Friends movie being made:
[Friends] was a multi-camera sitcom, and it had a different energy to it. I think if there would ever be anything like [a theatrical film], if Marta and David ever signed off on anything like that, it would have to be a different cast at that age. I think it would need to be more current—and more diverse representation is not a bad idea, you know?
The interviewer then asks about the current criticism of the original show for perceived lack of diversity, and Kudrow replies like so:
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. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color.
. . . which is the most sensible comment I've ever heard on the subject. If Kaufman and Crane had written a show about the personal lives of a racially/ethnically mixed group of friends, that would have been like -- well, not quite Amos & Andy, but not as true to life as them writing about people more or less like themselves.
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