The recent Friends reunion brought joy to millions of superfans around the world, but now actress Jennifer Aniston has opened up about some of the more difficult aspects of the taping.
In fact, in a new interview, Aniston referred to the special as having been "a sucker punch to the heart".
Earlier on in the year, all six of the main cast members of the hit NBC sitcom reunited on screen for the first time since Friends came to an end all the way back in 2004. As reunions tend to be, the program was a very nostalgic and sentimental one.
But in a new interview with The New York Times, Aniston admitted to finding it difficult to return to the old memories - as it reminded her that things were a lot "simpler" then.
Harking back to the end of the beloved sitcom, Aniston recalled that the cast was "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".
The 52-year-old actress told the paper that she and her co-stars "had such blissful ignorance going into the reunion".
She added: "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."
"One of the real emotional things for me was the realization that times were so much simpler then. For one thing, we didn’t have social media the way we have now," she added.
Aniston also spoke about the special with Rob Lowe on his podcast Literally! and referred to some aspects of the reunion as "brutal".
She told the actor: "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. I think it really took us all down way harder than we anticipated."
