David Schwimmer jokes about Friends lack of diversity at TV Baftas

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Kelly Rissman

US News Reporter

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David Schwimmer joked about Friends‘s lack of diversity while presenting at the 2019 TV Baftas.

The actor, who played Ross Geller on the 1990s sitcom, took to the stage alongside Nick Mohammed, his co-star on Sky One’s upcoming series Intelligence.

“We’re also here to celebrate the huge, huge array of diversity within Bafta,” Mohammed said. “Not just on display across all the shows nominated tonight, but also in terms of those presenting the awards.”

“That’s right, look at us. Only 50% of us is white heterosexual male,” Schwimmer added, to which Mohammed replied: “And we all remember how diverse Friends was...”

“Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was a groundbreaking show in that fully half the cast were women, and I made sure we were all paid equally,” Schwimmer said. Mohammed added: “Wasn’t Courteney Cox making more than the rest of you when you first started?”

Schwimmer joked: “Yes, that was a problem.”

The arrival of Friends on Netflix has led many viewers to reassess the popular sitcom’s storylines, with some pointing out insistences of sexism, transphobia, and homophobia.

While the show ran for more than 10 years until 2004, it arrived on Netflix at the end of last year in the UK.