Jennifer Aniston says filming Friends reunion was an emotional gut punch

From the moment HBO Max first announced its plans for the Friends reunion, we knew we’d be in store for an emotional event, unlike anything we had seen before.

Sure, the cast had reunited over the years in a series of mini-reunions via cameos and a few late-night bits, but not since the series signed off the airwaves had we had the core group of Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer had come together at once.

When the reunion dropped, it was everything we hoped it would be and it was definitely an emotional rollercoaster ride for fans watching across the globe. However, the reunion wasn’t just emotional for the fans watching on HBO Max. In fact, none of the cast was prepared for the emotional gut punch that came from returning for the reunion.

Jennifer Aniston says the Friends reunion was an emotional sucker punch

In the latest installment of Variety’s Actors on Actors, Friends icon Jennifer Aniston was joined by Marvel star Sebastian Stan for a candid conversation about their careers.

When the conversation shifted to Friends, Stan admitted he couldn’t imagine how surreal coming back together with her cast members on the set of the Friends reunion was.

As curiosity set in, Stan pondered how it felt filming the reunion which was when Aniston confessed she and her castmates weren’t quite prepared for just how emotional filming would turn out to be.

"“I don’t know we expected for it to sucker punch us as hard as it did in the emotional gut,” Aniston recalled. “We just had the idea this is going to be so fun — we’re going back to the sets exactly the way they were. And literally, every single nook on a shelf was the same. It was so creepy. But each and every one of us, we walked in, it was just like, “Oh!”."

While Aniston confessed the reunion was more emotional than she had prepared for it to be, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it all. In fact, as she told the Falcon and the Winter Soldier star, “I wouldn’t change a lick of it.”

The Friends reunion is streaming now on HBO Max.