Jennifer Aniston: How the “Friends” reunion put her back in “the most difficult period of her life”
In an interview for “The Hollywood Reporter”, Jennifer Aniston returned to the special reunion episode of “Friends”, which aired in may 2021.
They created the event on May 27th in 2021. Seventeen years after the last episode of “Friends” aired, marking the end of a sitcom that rocked generations around the world, our six favorite New Yorkers came together for the first time, the time to reunion special airs on HBO Max. The opportunity for Jennifer Aniston (Rachel), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe), Courteney Cox (Monica), Matthew Perry (Chandler), Matt LeBlanc (Joey), and David Schwimmer (Ross) to immerse themselves in the mythical sets of the series, to slip many anecdotes to the fans but also to take a leap into the past, and in particular in their respective personal lives. Wednesday, December 8, this is what Jennifer Aniston confided in the columns of the “Hollywood Reporter”, affirming that the meeting “Friends” had plunged her back into “the most difficult period of her life”.
“It was very shocking”
“I think we were so naive going in and saying, ‘This is going to be fun. They put the sets back in place, exactly as they were at the time”, begins the interpreter of Rachel. She continues: “And then you get there and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought about what was going on the last time I was there.’ And I was surprised because it was like, ‘Do you remember me? Do you remember how bad it was? You thought everything was ahead of you and life was going to be beautiful and then you went through the hardest time of your life?” It was very shocking and there were cameras everywhere so I had to go out at times. »
Broadcast between 1994 and 2004 on the NBC network, the “Friends” series coincides with the love story of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. At the time, the two stars were married from 2000 to 2005, before the actor fell in love with Angelina Jolie on the set of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”. When the journalist from the “Hollywood Reporter” asks her how she imagined her life after “Friends”, the 52-year-old actress replies, without ever quoting her ex-husband: “The career was one thing. I didn’t know what was going to happen, and it was a blessing (…) These are more personal things, on which I had expectations, which have changed. That’s what shocked me, the fact that we all had an idea of what the future was going to hold for us and then everything changed overnight, and that was it. However, Jennifer Aniston does not regret anything about her past. She concludes: “Everything is a blessing if you are able to look at the ups and downs of life in this way. And if all this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be sitting here and I wouldn’t be the woman that I am. »
