Jennifer Aniston has opened up about some of the tougher aspects of the recent Friends reunion.
Earlier this year, all six members of the sitcom’s main cast came together on screen for the first time since Friends ended in 2004, for a one-off look back at some of their highlights of working on the show.
While the special was by-and-large a joyful watch, Jen admitted last week that she found parts of the show “brutal” to make.
In a new interview with the New York Times, the award-winning star elaborated on this idea, admitting that she and her co-stars “had such blissful ignorance going into the reunion”.
“We were thinking, ‘How much fun is this going to be, to go back to Stage 24 exactly the way it was, exactly the way we left it?’,” Jen told the newspaper. “But it was a sucker punch to the heart.
“It turns out that it’s not so easy to time travel.”
Looking back to when Friends aired its finale in 2004, Jen said she and her castmates “were all bright eyed and bushy-tailed, looking toward the future”.
“But there was a lot to come for everyone,” she continued. “Hard truths and changes and loss and babies and marriages and divorces and miscarriages.
“One of the real emotional things for me was the realisation was that times were so much simpler then. For one thing, we didn’t have social media the way we have now.”
Jennifer recently told Rob Lowe on his podcast Literally!: “Going back there, it’s nostalgic in a way that’s kind of also a little melancholy, you know? Because a lot has changed and we have all gone down different roads, some easy and some not so easy for each of us.
“It was brutal, and also you can’t turn it off.”
She continued: “I think it really took us all down way harder than we anticipated.”