Jennifer Aniston has revealed that she walked out of the Friends reunion earlier this year because the experience was “very jarring”.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Aniston said that she expected the reunion to be “fun,” but ended up walking out of filming “at certain points” after becoming emotional.
“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.’ ”
She continued: “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?’ ”
Aniston continued on to describe the experience as “very jarring,” saying: “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.”
When asked what exactly caused her to feel so confronted, she opened up more about her life during the filming of Friends.
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“It was more personal stuff that I had expectations about that sort of shape-shifted, so to speak,” she said.
She continued: “That was what was jarring, that we all had an idea of what the future was going to be and we were going to go hunker down and focus on this or that and then it all just changed overnight, and that was it.”
“But again, everything’s a blessing if you’re able to look at life’s ups and downs in that way. And if it all hadn’t happened, I would not be sitting here the woman that I am.”
“Is it a sliver of an annoyance to have to publicly go through dark shit in front of the world? Yes, it’s an inconvenience, but it’s all relative,” she continued.
“So, I had a choice to make: Either I’m going to surrender into bonbons and living under my covers or I’m going to go out there and find a creative outlet and thrive, and that’s what I did.”
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Check out Jennifer Aniston in a clip from the Friends reunion:
