Jennifer Aniston Says the Friends Reunion Was "Way Harder" Than Expected
In the first part of 2020, just before the coronavirus outbreak shutdown the world and WarnerMedia was preparing to launch their streaming service HBO Max, plans were underway for a special Friends reunion to be shot and made exclusively for the platform. Due to quarantine and lock downs the plans for the reunion were delayed for over a year with Friends: The Reunion finally premiering in May of 2021 to huge numbers. Now with a little bit of time to reflect on the reflection, series star Jennifer Aniston says that the reunion was a hard thing to pull off and kind of a bummer.
People brings word of this interview which was part of the latest episode of the Literally! With Rob Lowe podcast. Aniston at first revealed the reluctance on her part and with her co-stars to even take part in a reunion but revealed the take from producer-director Ben Winston is what made them all agree to appear. "(His idea) just resonated with all of us, and it didn't sound like something that would cheapen or tarnish something that was perfectly left in its place." But in the end it was digging up the memories that seemed to be the hardest.
"I think it really took us all down way harder than we anticipated," Aniston revealed to Lowe. "Because in your mind, you think, 'Oh, this will be really fun to time travel.' It turns out, oh, ouch - it's kind of hard to time travel. Because you're going back to a time and mind you it is when I say the set was put back exactly, it was the exact same everything. Down to the little tchotchkes on the shelve and little tiny things that had been in a storage space for this whole time. All of a sudden, here you are. And, you know, 16 years, a lot has gone on for each of us."
She added about the filming experience, "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. There's cameras everywhere and I can't stop crying....There was a period where we were all kind of in a puddle. Maybe David didn't (cry), I don't think we broke David. But even LeBlanc broke at one point. You know, Mr. Tough Guy....Even he got a little misty."
You can stream every episode of Friends, as well as Friends: The Reunion, on HBO Max.