Friends actor Stephen Park is looking back at a racist incident he experienced while filming the hit sitcom in the 1990s.
The actor, who appeared in two episodes of the show — “The One With the Chicken Pox” in season two and “The One With the Ultimate Fighting Champion” in season three — recalled working on Friends during a recent episode of the Pod Meets World podcast.
“It was at the time, I felt it was kind of a toxic environment,” Park said about Friends. “James Hong [known for roles in Everything Everywhere All at Once and Kung Fu Panda, among hundreds of other projects] was the actor who was also on the episode with me, and [the AD] was calling him to the set and you know, essentially saying, you know, ‘Where the fuck is the Oriental guy? Get the Oriental guy.’”
The Mickey 17 actor said he knew “this is bigger than this show” as “this isn’t the first time that this happened, you know, but this is the environment where this is business as usual in Hollywood in 1997, I guess it was. And nobody felt the need to correct this or say anything about it. So this is normal behavior.”
After, an angry Park said he wanted to speak out about his experience. “When I called the Screen Actors Guild after that happened, the person I spoke with recommended I write an article to the L.A. Times,” he recalled. “I started writing this mission statement and I sent it to the L.A. Times. They sent a couple of reporters and interviewed me, and then they never printed it.”
That’s when Park decided to take it upon himself to get his open letter out (which can still be found online) and sent his “mission statement out to who was on my email list.” And while he claimed “it went viral before ‘viral’ was even a word,” the whole experience impacted his perspective on the industry.
“I had become so race-conscious and so angry that I was looking at everything through the lens of race,” the Asteroid City actor explained. “I felt like there was no freedom. I didn’t feel any freedom. So, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do, but I just decided to drop out. I told everybody, ‘I’m not acting anymore.’”
Following a year’s hiatus, he had a “slow climb back into the business” after being asked to audition for a role. Park has appeared in dozens of projects throughout his career, including Ghosted, The Mindy Project and Law & Order.
Friends, which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004, starred Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer and Matthew Perry (who died in 2023).
