Jennifer Aniston says 'Friends' reunion was 'jarring' and cast were 'naive' before filming

Jennifer Aniston has revealed that the cast of Friends was "naive" ahead of the hit sitcom's hotly-anticipated reunion special earlier this year.

In May, all six of the main cast members of the hit NBC sitcom reunited on screen for the first time since the hit show came to an end all the way back in 2004. As reunions tend to be, the program was a very nostalgic and sentimental one.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Aniston spoke about her feelings ahead of the reunion with her beloved co-stars and said she had found the experience "jarring".

"I think we were just so naive walking into it, thinking, 'How fun is this going to be? They're putting the sets back together, exactly as they were,'" she said.

"Then you get there and it's like, 'Oh right, I hadn't thought about what was going on the last time I was actually here.'

"And it just took me by surprise because it was like, 'Hi, past, remember me? Remember how that sucked? You thought everything was in front of you and life was going to be just gorgeous and then you went through maybe the hardest time in your life?'"

She went on: "It was all very jarring and, of course, you've got cameras everywhere and I'm already a little emotionally accessible, I guess you could say, so I had to walk out at certain points. I don't know how they cut around it."

Aniston previously told The New York Times 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."

Back in September, Aniston spoke about the reunion with Rob Lowe on his podcast Literally! and referred to some aspects of the special 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."

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