The Friends Reunion special which aired earlier this year has birthed some pretty huge revelations, including those from Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.
Among the co-stars to have dropped a few bombshells along the way was Matthew Perry, who has been the focus of health concerns following his public struggle with substance abuse during the filming of the series.
And now in a recent interview, Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston has spoken on the “self torture” that Perry experienced during the show – which he revealed during the reunion episode. He elaborated on the level of stress and anxiety he would experience when it came to receiving attention from the show’s audience.
During the reunion episode he told the cast, “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh. And it’s not healthy, for sure. But I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions. If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out.”
In Aniston’s interview with Today, Anniston said that she didn’t understand what he was doing through from that regard. She said, “I didn’t understand the level of anxiety and self-torture [that] was put on Matthew Perry, if he didn’t get that laugh, and the devastation that he felt. Which makes a lot of sense.”
She also added, “I’ve had so many gorgeous times in my life, but that was such a specific experience as an act creatively [and] how it affected all of our careers. We didn’t understand in those four walls of stage 24 the impact that it was having on the world, which was also, that was crazy. Talk about emotions.”
“To have an opportunity to land on people’s hearts all over the world, that’s kind of incredible, whether it was helping them with grief, mental illness, illness of any kind of disease, learning how to speak English. It’s just sort of a very… you can’t really explain it.”
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