The actor who played Chandler Bing's iconic "rebound roommate" Eddie in Friends has addressed the show's lack of diversity.
The hit series ran from 1994 to 2004 and centered on the lives of six friends living in New York: Rachel Green (played by Jennifer Aniston), Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow), Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc), Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) and Matthew Perry's Chandler.
The show's main characters were white, while there were occasional appearances by people of color in supporting roles. In recent years, viewers have questioned and reexamined the lack of diversity.
Adam Goldberg played Eddie, who momentarily replaced Joey in his and Chandler's apartment after the two men had a falling out. While Goldberg's character appeared in only three episodes of the sitcom, he has gone down as one of the show's most memorable roles.
In an interview with the Independent published on Sunday, Goldberg discussed his time on the show and commented on its lack of diversity.
"In terms of diversity, looking back, it seems insane. I've heard Black people speak about this and it's like, you never expected to see yourself, so when you didn't, it was not a surprise, and you ended up identifying to characters, irrespective of their race," he told the publication.
Goldberg continued: "It was just the norm that there was such a lack of diversity. I mean, I spent a lot of my career complaining about how Italians can play Jews. You see De Niro play Jews but you very rarely see someone who's a known Jewish actor playing Italian.
"So that's where my head was at. Or I would get feedback about not being all-American enough, which, you know, if you were to say that to somebody now you'd probably be fired. Or maybe not, because all-American has become such a derisive term."
Newsweek contacted spokespeople for Goldberg and show creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, for comment via email outside normal working hours.
Goldberg said that while Friends was on air, television was "just an amplification" of what was happening in the culture at the time.
This isn't the first time a Friends actor has addressed the topic of diversity, as two of the main cast members previously shared their thoughts on the issue.
In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Schwimmer said he'd made a "conscious push" to have his character date more women of color.
"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."
Kudrow has also addressed the show's lack of diversity, saying the story was based on the writers' personal experiences.
"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 told the Daily Beast in 2022.
"They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color," she continued.
Kudrow added that any future Friends projects "would need to be more current—and more diverse representation is not a bad idea, you know?"
During a panel at the ATX TV Festival in 2020, Kauffman said she "didn't do enough" to promote racial diversity in the show.
In 2022, she told the Los Angeles Times that she had changed her view about the criticism over the lack of diversity—which she originally found "difficult and frustrating"—in the years after George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
"I've learned a lot in the last 20 years. Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy," she said. "It's painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know better 25 years ago."
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