Actresses Jane Sibbett and Jessica Hecht as lesbian couple Carol and Susan on Friends Photo: Screenshot, YouTube
Actress Jane Sibbett is well-known for portraying Carol, the ex-wife of Ross on the long-running 1990s sitcom Friends. But while the show was lauded for its representation of lesbian characters, Sibbett’s father was no fan of the show.
Friends begins with the main character Ross (David Schwimmer), having recently been left by his wife Carol, (Sibbett) because she had come out as a lesbian and wanted to be with her girlfriend, Susan. While the plotline was used for laughs, it also presented a rare positive TV representation of a lesbian character.
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In season 2, Carol and Susan announced that they were getting married, and the episode with their wedding was the first lesbian wedding ever portrayed on a primetime TV show. Sibbett, however, received pushback and homophobia for her portrayal of Carol, she recently told The Sun.
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“I would say there was 95% support, but once I had flown to Canada to shoot a Disney movie and a child was yelling at me out of a school window,” she said. “He was shouting, ‘Go home, American f*g’ and I just went, ‘Wow, wrong on so many levels, dude. Come down here and have a conversation with me.’”
The pushback came from community members too. “Then I had a woman from my old church call me up… and proceeded to tell me that I was going to burn in hell,” she shared.
“It caused stress in my own family,” Sibbett said. “We had a big situation with my father who wouldn’t watch the show. Thankfully, he came around to it in the end.”
“It was heartbreaking that he wouldn’t watch it. He would hold a Bible study group at the time it aired to ensure his friends wouldn’t see it either. It took my godfather writing a letter to him saying how proud he was of me for the wedding scene that cracked it for my father.”
“He thought, ‘Wait, I’m not going to be judged for this, and it can help people.’ It was great for that wound to be healed before my dad passed,” she said.
Sibbett married Karl Fink, a TV writer and producer, in 1992. They had three children together. She and Fink divorced in 2016. Sibbett has long advocated for survivors of domestic violence and has appeared in several TV movies and straight-to-video films in recent years.
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