Aisha Tyler, who played the professor at the center of a steamy paleontology love triangle on “Friends,” is unearthing the reality of joining the “biggest show on television.”
The 52-year-old actor, who played Charlie Wheeler, the love interest of Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani then David Schwimmer’s Ross Geller, recently spoke with Entertainment Tonight ahead of the 20th anniversary of her appearing on the show.
And she revealed she was actually “petrified” to take on the role.
“It was a massive show, a global hit,” Tyler continued. “To this day, people come up to me and go, ‘Charlie, Charlie,’ or they just go, ‘Black girl from ‘Friends.’”
Tyler was the only Black actor with a recurring role on the series. “Friends” co-creator Marta Kauffman retrospectively addressed the show’s lack of diversity, telling The Times’ Greg Braxton in 2022 that the “series’ failure to be more inclusive was a symptom of her internalization of the systemic racism that plagues our society.”
“I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years,” Kauffman said. “Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.”
Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay, also reflected on the backlash in 2020, commenting on how different the show would be if it were made today.
“Oh, it’d be completely different,” Kudrow told the Sunday Times. “It would not be an all-white cast … I’m not sure what else, but, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong.”
Tyler told ET that the hit sitcom’s stars, Jennifer Aniston, Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Schwimmer and LeBlanc, were incredibly kind and welcoming, but that her nerves were rattled regardless.
“I was shocked you couldn’t hear my teeth chattering the entire time I was on set.”
“We walked out and we did a curtain call where everybody does a bow to the audience at the end of the show. As we’re backstage, Matthew Perry just leans in and goes, ‘Get ready for your life to change,’” she continued. “It was a really sweet, kind thing to say to someone who’s just petrified and just trying not to pee on herself a little bit from fear.”
And according to Tyler, Perry was right.
“Sometimes you don’t really know what a job is going to do, how it’s going to change your life. You don’t know if it’s going to be a hit. You don’t even know if it’s going to be good. You’re just there to do your best work,” she said. “But I knew when I got ‘Friends’ that it was a big deal.”
Tyler revealed that before she landed the role on “the biggest show on television,” she’d seen every episode and considered herself a fan, which ultimately helped her to get a feel for its comedic styling.
“The show had a tempo. It had a way of kind of turning things on their head and emphasizing words in different ways … [than] you would in normal conversation,” Tyler continued. “They just had a way with word play and a way with them with delivering lines. It just felt unique to the show. I was a fan. I felt like I could do a ‘Friends’ joke.”
As for her favorite line on the series, Tyler recalls, “I literally yelled at somebody in the car the other day, ‘We’re on a break!’”
Twenty years after playing the paleontologist heartbreaker, Tyler is preparing to portray Jules on Apple TV+’s thriller “The Last Thing He Told Me” produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. The series premieres April 14.
