Stephen Park Revisits Racist Incident Prompting His 1997 Open Letter

Actor and comedian Stephen Park is looking back on what he describes as a “toxic environment” he experienced on the set of Friends in the ’90s and the racist incident that led him to write an open letter calling out Hollywood’s marginalization of Asian American actors.

Park, who also guest-starred in a 1998 episode of Boy Meets World, joined Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle on their Pod Meets World podcast where the hosts asked him about his 1997 “mission statement.”

“At the time, for me, I felt it was kind of a toxic environment,” Park said of the Friends set.

The actor appeared on the series twice, playing different roles in the season 2 episode “The One with the Chicken Pox” and in season 3’s “The One with the Ultimate Fighting Champion,” alongside fellow Asian American actor James Hong. Park recalled a crew member calling Hong to set, “essentially saying, you know, ‘Where the f— is the Oriental guy? Get the Oriental guy.’ ”

Park wrote in 1997 that the unnamed crew member “did not even have the respect to learn the name of the actor, a veteran of 40 years.”

“I was the only one who took notice, while all others proceeded as if it was business as usual,” he wrote. “Given the atmosphere on the set, it did not feel safe to say anything.”

Park told Fishel, Friedle and Strong that he reported the incident to the Screen Actors Guild, where someone suggested he write about his experience for the L.A. Times. Having just seen Jerry Maguire, Park said he was partly inspired to do so by Tom Cruise’s character’s own mission statement in the movie.

“Why don’t I write a mission statement to Hollywood?” Park recalled thinking. “Because this is bigger than this show. This isn’t the first time this has happened … this is business as usual in Hollywood in 1997.”

But, Park said, while the L.A. Times sent reporters to interview him, the paper never published his statement. Instead, he sent the piece out to his email contacts, encouraging them to forward it on.

“I was getting responses from all across the country from publications that were asking permission to reprint it,” he recalled. “It went viral before viral was even a word.”

Park said the experience of writing the piece and talking about it left him disillusioned with Hollywood. “I decided to quit acting,” he said. “I had become so race conscious and so angry … I didn’t have any idea what I was gonna do, but I just decided to drop out.”

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He did eventually return to acting after about a year, ultimately landing roles in Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (2009), Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (2023), among many others. But both his mission statement and his brief hiatus led to the perception that he had been “blacklisted,” which he only realized after hearing And Just Like That actor and comedian Bobby Lee discussing it on an episode of his podcast.

“I think a lot of people thought that, especially in the Asian American community,” Park said. “I texted Bobby and said, you know, ‘I wasn’t blacklisted.’ But who would have known anyway? You know? Because I wasn’t really working much anyway. There wasn’t a lot of a lot of work.”

“It took me a while, I think, to not only get back into the business but to move beyond this race consciousness that had overwhelmed me,” he added.

PEOPLE has reached out to both NBC and the LA Times for comment.