Jennifer Aniston says returning to Friends set was like ‘a sucker punch in the heart’

Jennifer Aniston says returning to the Friends set was like "a sucker punch in the heart".

The 52-year-old actress recently made a triumphant return to the set of the hit sitcom 17 years after the show came to an end to film a reunion special with her co-stars - Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, and Matt LeBlanc - for HBO Max.

And after the special aired last week, Jennifer has now detailed just how emotional it was to go back to the set that shaped her career.

She said: "It was a sucker punch in the heart in a way. It was for all of us, I think. Even Courteney we got tears out of."

Jennifer - who played Rachel Green in the sitcom from 1994 to 2004 - admitted she and her co-stars were "very naive in what [they] were expecting" when they returned to Stage 24 at the Warner Bros. Studios to film the reunion, and when they saw all the same props and set pieces used in the original series, they were overcome with emotion.

She added: "We romanticised it, but you also have to remember we haven't been there [since the series finale]. And that time was a very specific time, when we were saying goodbye to something that we didn't want to, we cared deeply about, but we knew it was the time to say goodbye. Our lives were ahead of us. We had our future ahead of us.

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"It almost felt like time had stopped and we time travelled. And there's good in that, and then there's heartbreak in that."

And the Morning Show star also said she still struggles to find the words to describe just how important Friends is to her, even after all these years.

Speaking to Gayle King on SiriusXM's Gayle King in the House, she said: "It's really hard to put that into a sentence, except it filled my heart. The amount of love that people have for these six characters is something that you can't really explain the meaning of it.

"Being reminded of the amount of happiness this show brought to people, that's a special thing to be a part of."