After reuniting with her Friends co-stars for a one-off special in May, Jennifer Aniston addressed why she found the reunion so “brutal” to film.

Fans have been looking forward to the Friends reunion for a long time, especially when it was postponed for a year owing to coronavirus fears. When it eventually aired in May of this year, both fans and the performers were overcome with emotion when they reunited. On Rob Lowe’s podcast, Literally!, Jennifer Aniston expressed her astonishment at how difficult it was to see the old set and her co-stars.

Aniston told Lowe, “We didn’t know what it would look like,” referring to the reunion. “I mean, we’d been hearing about it for a long time, [and] we knew that people wanted it—fans really wanted kind of a reunion.”

“I think it really took us all down way harder than we anticipated,” she continued. “In your mind, you think, ‘Oh, this will be really fun to time travel… It turns out… it’s kind of hard to time travel.”

Friends: The Reunion, hosted by James Corden, brought together the core cast of the 1990s sitcom, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer.

Aniston and David Schwimmer, who played Rachel and Ross on the show, had a “major crush” on each other when filming the show in the 1990s, the episode revealed.

The Friends set had been largely reconstructed for the event, and she was taken aback by how well it had been preserved, stating that the reunion space had “the exact same everything, down to the little tchotchkes on the shelves, and little tiny things that had been in storage space [the] whole time.”

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“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,” Aniston said.

They also chatted with some of the show’s regular cast members and conducted table readings of some of the show’s most memorable episodes.

“All of a sudden, here you are, and, you know, 16 years… a lot has gone on for each of us. Sixteen years ago, we were all sort of wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, and sort of had our whole lives ahead of us, even though we were heartbroken to say goodbye to these 10 years and… the job we all loved to do.

Realizing how much time has passed is usually a shock, and Aniston found herself pondering about aging.

Apparently, everyone shed a tear except “maybe David didn’t… I don’t think we broke David.”

“But even LeBlanc broke at one point. You know, Mr. Tough Guy… Even he got a little misty.”

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Aniston’s most recent endeavor is her return to Apple TV’s The Morning Show for season two, in which she plays news anchor Alex Levy opposite Reese Witherspoon.

The emotional connection between the original Friends actors and the reunion was perhaps the most memorable and impactful aspect of the program. In fact, it was one of the reasons why some long-time fans were confused as to why so many distinguished guests were invited. While the celebrity cameos did provide some variation, many people had tuned in to witness the very few scenes with just the six main characters. And, based on Aniston’s statements, those instances resulted from feelings that weren’t necessarily happy or easy to categorize. As a result, limiting the Friends reunion to the show’s six regulars may have been more effective in the end.

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Jennifer Aniston has no intentions to talk about her personal life in detail anytime soon. In a recent interview with Glamour, she stated that she had no intentions to write a book.

“Nope. I say that now, but you know, cut to four or five years from now, and I might be like: I’m going to write a memoir! But I’m still living it. I have nothing to memoir about just yet…. There’s a lot when you think about it, but I still feel like I just got here.”