The ’90s TV sitcom Friends is beloved in a way that’s so ingrained in our culture it’s hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. This became all the more apparent after the death of Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the show. In a recent interview, Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel, broke down emotionally when remembering the glory days.
Variety has an ongoing interview series called “Actors on Actors,” and Aniston spent some time with fellow Emmy winner Quinta Brunson for a poignant conversation around the show’s 30th anniversary.
Toward the end of the wide-reaching interview, we hear a producer off-screen direct Brunson to ask Aniston “what it’s like to watch Friends now.” The question send Aniston on a journey and she immediately got emotional.
Brunson asked, “Do you want a minute? We don’t have to talk about it.” Aniston said, ““No, sorry, I just started thinking about—,” and after Brunson commiserated, she said, “I’m okay. It’s happy tears.”
Later in the talk, she shares a nice memory of Perry. She said the two were “having lunch somewhere” and decided to sneak into the hair salon where Lisa Kudrow was “getting her hair colored.” Aniston said Kudrow was “in the sink” and she took the nozzle and started “washing her hair. It definitely flew out of control, and that was unfortunate. But the excitement we had, it feels like yesterday.”
Aniston said the fact that the show has had “this long, wonderful life” and still “means a lot to people” is a gift that “all five of us—all six of us—we never could imagine.”
She said she still keeps in contact with her costars and that she “talked on FaceTime with Court[eney Cox] last night for an hour,” and also speaks with “Lisa and the boys” all the time. It’s a “family forever,” she said.
Perry was very open about his battles with drug addiction over the years, something he described in harrowing detail in his hit memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. In his book, he wrote “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned—I want helping others to be the first thing that’s mentioned. And I’m going to live the rest of my life proving that.”
Aniston also recently honored her former co-star by asking people to take the time to donate to Perry’s foundation, which is focused on battling addiction.
“For #GivingTuesday please join me and Matty’s family in supporting his foundation – which is working to help those suffering with addiction 🤍,” Aniston wrote on her Instagram story over a photo of Perry laughing. “He would have been grateful for the love.”
