Jennifer Aniston has an idea about how the Friends characters would’ve fared in quarantine. In an interview with Today.com, the 52-year-old actress guessed how Rachel (Aniston), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Ross (David Schwimmer), Joey (Matt LeBlanc), and Chandler (Matthew Perry) would have spent their time in lockdown.
“You might have thought the cast of Friends was actually in a quarantine because all they did was hang out in the apartment, aside from the coffeehouse,” she said. “But the boys would have figured out a game to play — the one where they didn’t have to drop a ball for how many days.”
Aniston noted that she and her fictional pals would have all clapped for the hospital workers nightly, and noted the friends would have been strict about remaining indoors, “except maybe not Phoebe so much, because she was a free spirit.”
Even when the COVID-19 restrictions began going away, Aniston said she and the rest of the group would’ve still hung out with only each other.
“They would be in each other’s pods,” she said. “So as long as they saw each other, which, well, that’s easy. So we would have Ross’ apartment to go to, we would have Phoebe’s apartment to go to, Rachel and Monica’s, and Joey and Chandler’s. So you have four locations so that they wouldn’t go crazy.”
One thing that wouldn’t change throughout lockdown? “Someone, I think, would probably make the coffee runs,” Aniston speculated. “And who would have done that? Everyone. Each and every one would’ve shared the duty.”
Aniston’s idea for a quarantine episode comes after the Friends cast reunited for a long-awaited HBO special. During the reunion, Aniston and Schwimmer revealed they had real-life crushes on each other while they were playing love interests on the show. The news sent fans into a frenzy, which Aniston credited to both the Ross-Rachel storyline and her chemistry with her co-star.
“I think there was something about unrequited love and really investing in those [relationships]. I think David and I loved each other — we love each other still to this day — so I do think there was something that had to do with that,” she said. “And you were investing in something that was very relatable: the one that you never could have or the one you wanted to be with but they couldn’t quite get it together.”
As for the show as a whole, Aniston said making it was “the greatest time in my life.”
“I’ve had so many gorgeous times in my life but that was such a specific experience… how it affected all of our careers,” she said. “We didn’t understand in those four walls of stage 24 the impact that it was having on the world, which was also… crazy. Talk about emotions.”
“… To have an opportunity to land on people’s hearts all over the world, that’s kind of incredible, whether it was helping them with grief, mental illness, illness of any kind of disease, learning how to speak English,” she added. “It’s just sort of a very… you can’t really explain it.”
