For a decade we welcomed the Friends into our lives and stuck with them through all their trials and tribulations.
The show was everywhere at it’s peak and was impossible to avoid so even the most fair-weather fan would surely think they knew everything there was to know about it.
However, the reunion special revealed some secrets that, in some cases, even surprised the cast.
Here are the top five things we learned from The One Where the Friends Got Back Together.
Warning: contains spoilers.
1. Ross and Rachel were nearly a real life thing
The Ross and Rachel romance was at the heart of Friends since the very beginning. Firstly, because of Ross’ unrequited love, and later because of their ups and downs in their relationship. And who can forget the infamous “we were on a break” incident. Suffice to say their romance was a rollercoaster.
And it almost mirrored real life. In the reunion show David Schwimmer who played Ross admitted: “I had a major crush on Jen. At some point we were both crushing hard on each other. But it was like two ships passing. One of us was always in a relationship and we never crossed that boundary.
“When we had breaks from rehearsal, there were moments we would cuddle on the couch. I’m thinking, How did not everyone know we weren’t crushing on each other? It was a situation that we couldn’t do anything about it.”
Jennifer Aniston confirmed their real life feelings saying: “I remember saying one time to David, It’s going to be such a bummer if the first time you and I actually kiss is on national television. And sure enough, the first time we kissed was in that coffee shop. We channeled all of our adoration and love for each other into Ross and Rachel.”
Perhaps their real lives would have been less complicated if they had ended up together. Aniston famously married Brad Pitt (who guest starred in an episode of the show) but they divorced amid rumours he had a fling with his Mr and Mrs Smith co-star Angelina Jolie. This led to people declaring their allegiance to Team Jennifer or Team Angelina and all these years later she still finds it difficult to escape.
In 2015 ahead of the 2015 Critics Choice Awards, when both she and Jolie were nominated for their work in Cake and Unbroken, respectively Aniston told ET: "I think that it's time people stop with that petty BS and just start celebrating great work and stop with the petty kind of silliness. It's just tiresome and old. It's like an old leather shoe. Let's buy a new pair of shiny shoes."
Aniston went on to marry Justin Theroux in 2015 but that union also ended in divorce.
For his part Schwimmer is also a divorcee. He dated singer-songwriter Natalie Imbruglia in the late 1990s. In 2007 he began a relationship with British artist Zoë Buckman and they married in June 2010and welcomed a daughter in 2011. However in April 2017 they announced that they were "taking some time apart" abd they divorced later that year.
2. Filming was more dangerous than it looked
Although the show may have appeared to be a pretty safe environment, where the cast mainly sat around in the coffee shop or lounged around in an apartment, Matt LeBlanc discovered that it was actually pretty dangerous.
On the reunion show series creator David Crane revealed that the actor suffered a catastrophic injury while shooting The One Where Nobody’s Ready. Joey and Chandler were fighting over who gets to sit in an armchair. Joey ran and jumped into it and Matt recalled that he “somehow tripped - and my shoulder came out of the socket.”
This caused a production nightmare as he was carted off to hospital and they had to write it in to future episodes using the excuse that Joey hurt himself while jumping on the bed. Crane recalled: “It happened to be the one episode where it was just the six of them, all in it - so we couldn’t film other scenes,” and LeBlanc's injury made this episode the longest to shoot, added Crane.
3. Matthew Perry struggled with filming in front of an audience.
Friends was taped in front of a live studio audience every week and while the rest of the cast seemed to enjoy the buzz – David Schwimmer described it as “like performing a one-act play every week” – Matthew Perry found it incredibly difficult
The actor has struggled with his mental health and has had well documented substance abuse issues and on the Reunion he revealed that he found the recordings incredibly stressful.
“I felt like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh” he admitted, as the six shared memories of taping night. “I would sweat and shake...”
A shocked Kudrow said: “You never told us that at the time” to which he responded “I felt like that every single night”.
Matthew’s addiction struggles and substance abuse was so bad that he doesn’t remember three seasons of the show. When asked about his least favourite episodes during an interview with BBC's Chris Evans, he replied, "I don't remember three years of it so none of those. I was a little out of it at the time. Somewhere between seasons three and six."
4. The Reunion is the first time they have all been in the same room since 2004
Although they played BFF’s on screen the group admitted that they hadn’t all been together in the same room since the show ended. Courtney Cox seems to want to rectify that saying “Let’s not wait this long before having a dinner” at the end of the show.
They almost reunited in January 2016 for a pre-taped special honouring the career of director James Burrows. However shortly after NBC announced that they were hoping to get them all together Perry's people announced that the actor would not be at the event because he was in rehearsals for a play in London.
The year before that, in 2015, it appeared there was an opportunity for them all to get together at Jennifer Aniston’s Wedding to Justin Theroux – but the guys invitations all seem to have got lost in the post. Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer were not in attendance despite her female co-stars being there. In fact Courtney Cox was her maid of honour.
Matt later told People: "If she wanted me there, I would have been there. I think she's happy. And that's all I care about." While Perry said: "I wasn't invited. So what can you do?"
5. The producers almost didn't get their dream cast
Marta Kauffman and David Crane, who created the show revealed that casting the show took them much longer than anticipated. Ross was written with David Schwimmer in mind after he had auditioned for one of their previous shows. They said his “hang dog expression” stuck in their minds. But when they called his agent, they were told that he had given up on TV and gone back to Chicago to focus on the theatre. It took all their powers of persuasion – and a few gift baskets - to lure him back to LA.
After Matthew Perry’s audition they were thrilled to have found their Chandler. Unfortunately he was already committed to another show about luggage handlers set in a futuristic version of LAX airport.
It looks as bonkers as it sounds in the clips shown on the reunion show and thankfully the powers that be clearly thought the same and released him from his contract.
Meanwhile Jennifer Aniston was working on another show called Muddling Through and already had a half a dozen episodes in the bag.
Unable to get her exclusively for Friends Kauffman and Crane agreed to share her for the first few episodes, banking on the possibility that her first show wouldn’t be picked up by a network. Obviously it wasn’t, but if it had been they would have had to reshoot everything with a different actress.
