Jennifer Aniston says Friends cast experienced ‘hard truths, loss, miscarriages’ in wake of show

Jennifer Aniston has said that the Friends cast experienced “hard truths, loss and miscarriages” in the wake of the show.

Aniston’s star-making sitcom hit came to a close in 2004 after 10 seasons, and the cast reunited earlier this year for a 90-minute special in which they reminisced about the series.

In a new interview, Aniston has revealed that the reunion special was “a sucker punch to the heart”, and that it made her aware that the cast experienced enormous personal upheaval once the show ended.

When the show concluded, Aniston said, the cast were “all bright eyed and bushy-tailed, looking toward the future, but there was a lot to come for everyone. Hard truths and changes and loss and babies and marriages and divorces and miscarriages”.

She added that she and her fellow cast members – Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer – went into the reunion with “blissful ignorance”.

“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.’ But it was a sucker punch to the heart. It turns out that it’s not so easy to time travel,” she told The New York Times. “One of the real emotional things for me was the realisation that times were so much simpler then. For one thing, we didn’t have social media the way we have now.”

During the reunion, Aniston and Schwimmer publicly revealed for the first time that they had “major crushes” on one another while filming the show’s first season.

In the wake of the reunion, both actors denied tabloid reports that the special had “stirred up feelings” between the pair and that they had started dating.

Aniston currently stars on the Apple TV+ drama series The Morning Show, which has been dubbed “a luxurious mess” by The Independent.