For actor and comedian Steve Park, a 1997 appearance on the hit sitcom Friends altered the course of his career — and not in the way he might have hoped.

As he recalled on the latest episode of the Boy Meets World rewatch podcast Pod Meets World, Park found the Friends set to be a “toxic” workplace and said he witnessed a crew member using racist language to refer to fellow guest actor James Hong. The incident galvanized Park to file a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild and write a headline-making “mission statement” calling for better treatment of Asian Americans in Hollywood.

“It was at the time, I felt it was kind of a toxic environment,” Park said of Friends, which was then in its third season on NBC. He also recounted an unnamed crew member calling Hong to set “and essentially saying, ‘Where is the Oriental guy? Get the Oriental guy.'”

Park explained to shocked podcast hosts Danielle Fishel, Will Friedle, and Rider Strong that, “When I called Screen Actors Guild after that happened, the person I spoke with recommended I write an article to the L.A. Times.” He decided to do just that, reasoning, “This is bigger than this show. This isn’t the first time this has happened. 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 was normal behavior.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for NBC, Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane, and Hong for comment on Park’s remarks.

Park said the L.A. Times sent reporters to interview him about his mission statement, “and then they never printed it.” (EW has reached out to the Times for comment.) He decided to distribute the statement himself via an email list, which led to “responses from all across the country from publications that were asking permission to reprint it. It went viral before ‘viral’ was even a word.”

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Park’s open letter was published in various outlets in the spring of 1997, connecting the Friends incident to larger abuses perpetrated against Asian Americans and other people of color working in the entertainment industry.

“If this was an isolated incident, I would not have felt compelled to write this mission statement. Unfortunately, I find this attitude and behavior commonplace in Hollywood,” Park wrote. “I know many people who have experienced this kind of indignity on a movie or television show set, and you can be sure this kind of thing is going on in the corporate culture as well.” He also noted, “Hate crimes against Asian-Americans are on the rise in this country, and negative portrayals of Asians in the media only encourage this trend.”

On Pod Meets World, Fishel called Park’s mission statement “ahead of its time” and “incredibly brave,” adding, “I really recommend everybody read it. It is still on the internet. And you’ll realize, you know, Steve was saying these things 26 years ago, and they are still relevant.”

Park said that the experience of writing and discussing the mission statement prompted him to step back from acting. “I had become so race-conscious and so angry that I was looking at everything through the lens of race,” he said. “I felt like there is 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.'”

Only recently when listening to comedian Bobby Lee‘s podcast did Park hear Lee remark offhand, “‘You know, [Park] got blacklisted.'”

Park realized a rumor had taken hold that he’d been blacklisted in Hollywood, when in reality he attributes his screen hiatus to a combination of factors, including the birth of his son, the effect writing the statement had on him, and the lack of substantive parts for Asian American actors. He told EW in 2021 that his character Mike Yanagita in Fargo was “the most interesting Asian American character I’d ever come across in a film script,” but even that “got some criticism from some in the Asian American community who felt I was perpetuating a stereotype of the weak, emasculated Asian man.”

Park did eventually make his way back to acting, appearing over the last decade in films by acclaimed directors like Bong Joon-ho, Miranda July, and Wes Anderson. He’ll next been seen in Bong’s sci-fi black comedy Mickey 17, which hits theaters March 7.

Listen to Park on Pod Meets World above.