Last week, it was just like old times as Jennifer Aniston pulled on to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., to join her former castmates in taping the “Friends” reunion special, which happened this week.
Now 52, the actress still looks remarkably like she did back in May 2004, when one of the biggest TV hits of all time ended after 10 seasons. She was even still driving her car of choice from back then, a Porsche.
And while it seemed like time has stood still, it actually took years — plus $3 million and an executive producing credit each, The Post is told by those familiar with negotiations — to get Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc on screen together again. (It’s not yet known when the special will air).
In the 17 years since “Friends” ended, the six have experienced births, marriages, divorces and devastating personal struggles, but throughout it all, they have remained, as the show’s theme song goes, there for each other.
“They’re a very tight-knit group,” a production source who worked on the show told The Post. “Everything they went through together bonded them. It’s a gift to have that kind of friendship.”
The reunion was meant to air on May 27, 2020, to mark the launch of streaming service HBO Max, but was pushed back multiple times because of lockdown.
However, over two days last week, the cast finally reunited at Stage 24 at Warner Bros., the show’s home for its 1994-2004 run on NBC, where character Monica Geller’s famous purple apartment was recreated in detail by set designer Greg Grande.
By Saturday night, the show’s official Instagram account posted that filming had finished.
There have been nerves among TV execs — and the stars themselves — as there is a lot riding on the reunion thanks to the big paychecks and anticipation from fans around the world eager to see Rachel Green (Aniston), Monica Geller (Cox), Phoebe Buffay (Kudrow), Ross Geller (Schwimmer), Joey Tribbiani (LeBlanc) and Chandler Bing (Perry) together again. It’s also meant to help draw subscribers to HBO Max, now the exclusive streaming home for reruns of the show.
But a source who was one of the very few people on set, told The Post: “It couldn’t have gone any better … I love these six people!”
Another insider revealed that strict pandemic and security measures were in play, with phones and laptops banned from the set. “It was super emotional. Just to see the cast together gave me chills,” the insider said. “Security was so tight as they’re desperate to keep things top secret.”
It’s not, according to Schwimmer, a continuation of the show. “I’ll be myself. I’ll be David. There’s nothing scripted. We’re not in character,” he recently told talk-show host Graham Norton. “Although there is one section of it that, I don’t want to give away, but where we, we all read something.”
The cast has been outspoken until now about not wanting to reunite as the characters.
“I don’t see it happening. It would be fun, but what would it be about? … The thing we liked best about the show was that they were 20-somethings and they were their own family,” Kudrow has said. “Now, they all have families, so what are we going to watch?”
Her comments echoed those of Aniston, who said in 2016: “I think why people have such an affection for [‘Friends’] is because … there was something about a time where our faces weren’t stuffed into cell phones. We weren’t checking Facebooks and Instagrams. We were in a room together, in a coffee shop together. We were talking, having conversations. We have lost that.”
The intense level of fame the young cast found on “Friends” quickly brought them together — as they were the only ones who could understand what they were all going through.
“The cast was so close that they had all their dressing rooms moved to one end of the soundstage upstairs. The guest stars were put at the other end of the studio, and they rarely talked to them,” the production source said.
“Jennifer and Lisa [Kudrow] and I ate lunch together every single day for 10 years. And we always had the same thing — a Cobb salad,” Cox recalled in 2010. “But it wasn’t really a Cobb salad. It was a Cobb salad that Jennifer doctored up with turkey bacon and garbanzo beans and I don’t know what … if you’re going to eat the same salad every day for 10 years, it’d better be a good salad, right?”
And when any of their friends went through hard times, the actors grew even more tight-knit.
Where all the ‘Friends’ are now:
“The cast would never talk to outsiders about each other,” said the production source. “When Matthew Perry really struggled with [drug and alcohol] addiction and got so sick, they closed ranks.”
Perry’s problems reached a dangerous point after a 1997 jet-ski accident that left him addicted to Vicodin. At the height of his addiction, Perry told People, “I was out of control and very unhealthy.” He has confessed that he doesn’t recall filming multiple seasons — during which viewers could see his drastic weight loss — of the sitcom. By 2001, he was drinking vodka by the quart and showing up to work hungover.“
I don’t remember three years of it,” he told BBC Radio 2 in 2016. “Somewhere between Seasons 3 and 6 … I was a little out of it.”
A former NBC staffer who worked on the show, told The Post: “Matthew said that being on the show was all a big blur for him, which is so sad. He was living a fabulous life and doing an extraordinary job entertaining all of America.”
He went through several stints in rehab and some scary health issues, including pancreatitis caused by alcohol abuse.
Among a close circle of loved ones caring for him was Cox, his Malibu neighbor. He also made another friend: a sober coach, who spent a lot of time at the Malibu mansion he sold in January for $13.1 million.
These reunion shows are brutal. There’s a lot of pressure to look good.
‘Friends’ source
“There have been times when she has been with him literally every day,” said a Hollywood source of the woman, who owns a business in Malibu.
Perry is said to have now been sober for several years. The 51-year-old actor announced his engagement to literary manager Molly Hurwitz, 29, in November, calling her “the greatest woman on the face of the planet at this time.” She was spotted with him this week at the reunion taping.
“He definitely struggled,” said the production source. “Now, I think he’s actually found some kind of peace in life.”
Perry appears healthy and trim after worrying photos of him looking much heavier than fans remembered surfaced last year.
Looking good for the reunion has been a big deal for the entire cast, sources told The Post. When the actors — minus Perry, who was starring in a play in London at the time — got together in 2016 for a tribute to directing legend James Burrows, who frequently helmed the show, “They were very conscious beforehand of taking care of themselves and looking good,” said a show source.
Reruns have emblazoned the images of the cast’s younger selves in fans’ brains, amping up the desire to look youthful.
“These reunion shows are brutal,” said the production source. “There’s a lot of pressure.”
Cox, 56, has admitted to overdoing it with cosmetic work. “I didn’t realize it until one day I kind of stepped back and went, ‘Oh s–t. I don’t look like myself,” she told People.
Married to “Scream” co-star David Arquette at the height of her “Friends fame,” Cox named Aniston as the goddaughter for the couple’s daughter, Coco, now 16. Arquette and Cox split in 2010 and she has been dating Snow Patrol singer Johnny McDaid for several years.
Aniston became a huge star while on the show — in part because of that famous shag haircut and a breakout movie career, but also because she wed A-lister Brad Pitt, who made a cameo on “Friends” as a chunky-turned-hunky former schoolmate who hated Aniston’s character, Rachel.
“Even when she became one of the most famous people in the world and was married to Brad Pitt,” the production source recalled, “they used to turn up together for the show taping on Friday nights.”
The two split in 2005, of course, when he took up with Angelina Jolie.
Now, a Pitt source said of the actor and Aniston (who later married and divorced actor Justin Theroux): “They’re friendly. Not like best friends, but they’re in a good place.”
As for LeBlanc, the production source said, “Matt has always stayed exactly who he is — a guy from Massachusetts who’s obsessed with motorcycles and cars and knows that he’s good at TV and has stayed there.”
Indeed, the 53-year-old has starred on sitcoms “Episodes” and “Man With a Plan.” He shares a 19-year-old daughter, Marina, with former wife Melissa McKnight, and dated Aurora Mulligan, a TV producer for the BBC, for several years beginning in 2016.
“Schwim is the most private of the group,” said the production source of Schwimmer, 54, who has popped up on TV shows including “Will & Grace” and “American Crime Story,” on which he uncannily played Robert Kardashian — lawyer to O.J. Simpson and father of Kim et al. The actor, who divorced photographer Zoe Buckman in 2017, is father to 9-year-old daughter Cleo.
Kudrow — who the production source called a “total hoot in real life” — has been busy with voiceover work and remains wed to businessman Michel Stern, her husband of 26 years and the father of her son Julian, now 22 and said to be a college student.
One question remains for the newly reunited “Friends”: Will they sit down and watch the special — and maybe some old episodes — together?
“I don’t watch the show,” Kudrow has said of reruns. “I’m still not watching it in the hopes that one day we sit down and watch them together.”