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The Friends Reunion Is Really Happening—Here's Everything We Know


Guys—they were just on a break. The Friends reunion, which has been rumored practically ever since the purple door with the yellow frame on it shut for the last time, is officially, really happening. All six Friends stars will reunite for an unscripted special for HBO Max, the new streaming service from WarnerMedia that’s set to launch in May, the company announced on February 21.

The beloved sitcom, which ended after ten seasons in 2004, hasn’t been available to stream since the end of 2019, when the series left Netflix. The HBO Max special will be released on the streaming platform along with all 236 Friends episodes. It may be time to make alliances with family members, co-workers, and ex-boyfriends to decide who you’re sharing your HBO Max account with. What I’m saying is—you need to find out who your friends are.

Both HBO Max and the cast are being pretty hush-hush about the reunion special. Here’s every detail we know so far.

Who’s coming back:

According to a press release from HBO Max, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer have all committed to reprising their roles in a new special, which will be executive produced by Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane, as well as original Friends producer Kevin Bright. They’ll shoot on the original “Friends” soundstage, Stage 24, on the Warner Bros. Studio lot in Burbank, California. Ben Winston, best known for his work on The Late Late Show with James Corden, will direct as well as executive produce. What is this? All nine Friends Thanksgiving episodes rolled into one? Because we’re feeling pretty grateful.

The release date:

According to a press release, the long anticipated Friends reunion special, as well as all episodes of the show, “will be available to subscribers at the launch of HBO Max.” The service is set to launch in May 2020, though no specific date has been announced.

How they made it happen:

It sounds like the actors got plenty of perks, if you will—Variety reports that a source claims that all six performers will be paid at least $2.5 million each for their work. (LET JENNIFER HAVE ANYTHING SHE WANTS.)

Breakout the foosball table, the holiday armadillo, the traditional English trifle, and the smelly cats. This is really happening.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow more of her pop-culture nonsense on Twitter.





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Matthew Perry’s ‘Friends’ Costars Had the Best Reactions to His Joining Instagram


Update 2/9/20:

Matthew Perry joined Instagram to much fanfare, especially from his Friends castmates including Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, and onscreen wife, Courteney Cox. But he made us all wait to see what his first post would actually be.

Of course, it was very Chandler Bing, using a GIF from the show where he dances around excitedly. “This is how thrilled I am to finally be on Instagram. So, here we go…” he wrote in the caption.

His second post also had that pitch-perfect Chandler sarcastic charm.

We can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Original story:

We never thought we’d see the day, but Chandler Bing is on Instagram at long last. Well, actually, the actor who played him is. Matthew Perry became the final cast member from Friends to hop onto the social media platform.

Lisa Kudrow made the announcement for him with a sweet throwback photo of the two of them—and a great reference to the show. “Finally!!! Yay!! Can’t believe my eyes MY EYES. Welcome to Instagram @mattyperry4 #friendsforlife,” she wrote in the caption. Perry already has more than 2 million followers—and he hasn’t even made a single post yet.



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Moms Need More Friends to Vent With


But women’s candor isn’t always met with acceptance, especially when it comes from mothers who are being honest about their partners and children. “I worry about vocalizing being frustrated because I get the, ‘Well, it’s your choice to have four kids,’” Shauna says. “And I do think about that sometimes—there are people who’d kill for the situation I’m in, so I need to be grateful for what I have. So I try to keep that mindset, but at the same time it shouldn’t prevent me from feeling frustrated or venting.”

“I think it doesn’t matter what your circumstances are—motherhood is still really really hard,” Laura says. “Growing up, some of my family would say that anger was ‘unlady-like,’ and now I think that’s the most toxic thing you could ever say…and it’s also not true. Everybody has the capacity for anger, so why is it that moms are expected to suppress it? Everybody needs a way to get it out.”

Plus, mom rage can also be productive. Moms aren’t just enjoying a weekly (or daily) bitching session then folding another load of laundry or rushing to another drop off—we’re running for office, voting in local, state, and federal elections, and staying politically active to ensure our anger becomes a catalyst for institutional change; change that would make it easier to raise children in a country that has historically and perpetually failed families, especially black families and families of color.

“There’s really such sisterhood in anger,” Jamie, 37, a mom of two and writer living in Connecticut, says. “I feel like so often our anger is turned against us in these totally manufactured ways.”

For Jamie, who says the majority of her mom friends are online, raging about the current political climate is cathartic, motivating, and an important release that gives her space both apart from her children and to envision a better future for them.

“It’s nice to rage with anyone about politics, but to specifically have moms—because I feel like they’re angry about it in the precise way I’m angry about it a lot of the time—to rage with is really, really nice,” she says.

Jamie says she talks to her mom friends about everything from climate change to the Iran conflict, the ongoing wars the United States is already involved in, and abortion rights at least once a day, every day.

“Being able to talk to somebody about it through the lens of motherhood — what about the long-term ramifications of this? — is cathartic,” she says. “It helps to know that you’re not alone and there are other people who care about this. It helps me remain politically active because no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, I feel like you can engage somebody via motherhood.”

The collective and righteous anger of American moms was felt during the 2018 midterm elections, when a record number of moms were elected to Congress. As a result, the first-ever “Moms in the House” caucus was created, where moms on both sides of the aisle (21 Democrats and four Republicans) can, as Rep. Debbie Waserman Shultz told The Washington Post, not only “be [in] support of one another but also to help each other be successful, to use it as a way for us to advance an agenda and collect our power, to move things forward.”

It took one block of relentless bitching before my simmering frustration abated. My friend softened, too.

Very few things in life are certain, particularly when it comes to parenthood, but one thing I know for sure is that another moment will present itself that will leave me indignant. And in that unavoidable moment—my one-year-old throwing a toy directly on my big toe, my five-year-old screaming that he hates me because, yes, one must wear pants to school, another anti-abortion bill forcing—I will know just who to call.

Danielle Campoamor is a reproductive justice and abortion rights activist and freelance writer, published in the New York Times,
the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with her partner and two children.



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This Video of Jennifer Aniston Surprising Fans on the ‘Friends’ Set Is So Good


Friends fanatics, I have a dream scenario for you: Imagine you’re visiting the set of Central Perk on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, and Jennifer Aniston pops up and surprises you. Well, this exact thing happened to a group of lucky fans this past week.

Here’s what happened: Aniston was guest-hosting The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which films on the same lot as Friends did, and decided to take a break and pop by her old stomping grounds. You see, fans can now actually tour the set of Central Perk, so Aniston decided to hide behind that iconic couch you know and love and give some visitors the scare of a lifetime. A good scare, obviously.

“The set is actually still here [on the Warner Bros. lot],” Aniston says in the clip. “It’s part of the Warner Bros. studio tour. So I thought, While I’m here, I’ll go take a visit.”

Watch the hilarious video for yourself, below. There is a lot of screaming involved.

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Don’t think this means a Friends reunion is happening soon, though. While Jennifer Aniston and several of the cast members have expressed interest in getting back together, nothing is on the books yet. A nonscripted reunion special was in the works at HBO Max (a new streaming service that will soon house all of Friends), but that’s been put on pause for now.

HBO Max chief creative officer Kevin Reilly told the Television Critics Association last week, per Deadline, “There is interest all around, and yet we can’t get the interests all alighted to push the button on it.” He said the reunion, for now, is “just a maybe.”

Hopefully something comes together. But if nothing happens, at least now we can hold on to the dream that one of the “friends” might surprise us on the Warner Bros. lot should we ever visit.



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This Pic of the Friends Cast the Night Before They Filmed the Finale Will Make You Emotional


Friends may be gone from Netflix, but it still holds a Central Perk-sized place in our hearts forevermore.

The show will be streaming again soon enough when HBO Max launches later this year, but until then we have some of the cast out here on Instagram sharing behind-the-scenes memories and reunion dinners.

The latest throwback comes from Courteney Cox, who posted a photo to commemorate the 16th anniversary of final episode taping. (It happened on January 23, 2004.) She also shared a shot of the final script’s cover. “‘The Last Supper’ before taping ‘The Last One’ on Jan. 23, 2004. #tbt #friends,” Cox wrote in the caption. All six main cast members—Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer—are present, along with copious amounts of food and sodas.

Kudrow wrote in the comments section, “Awwww???,” while Aniston used emojis to express her feelings with a simple, “???.” Jennifer Meyer, the jewelry designer and a close friend of Aniston and Cox, spoke for all Friends fans when she commented, “Stop teasing us and make this shit happen again @courteneycoxofficial @jenniferaniston thx ?.”

A Friends reunion show (of the non-scripted variety) has been in the works at HBO Max with interest from the entire cast. “We would love for there to be something,” she told Ellen DeGeneres in 2019. “But we don’t know what that something is. So we’re just trying. We’re working on something.” Unfortunately, though, the project recently hit a snag. Last week, HBO Max chief creative officer Kevin Reilly told the Television Critics Association, according to Deadline, “There is interest all around and yet we can’t get the interests all alighted to push the button on it.” For now, he called the reunion “just a maybe.”

Consider all of our fingers crossed. In the meantime, we have Instagram posts like Cox’s to keep us warm.



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Let Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt Be Friends in Peace


Backstage on the 19th, when they both accepted statutes at the SAG awards, a photographer captured an instantly-iconic photo of her hand, clasped under his. It looks, literally, like she is walking away from him, and like he is unable to let her go.

Cool, cool, cool, cool.

Mega-celebrities like Brad and Jen strike a strange deal with us, their public. We give them more money, value, and privilege of influence than anyone could ever need or want. In exchange, they entertain us—sometimes on screen, mostly in paparazzi shots and interviews and shady Instagram likes and breakdowns and addiction. Like the Greek gods were for mortals, they are our hotter, but similarly flawed, avatars. We project ourselves on them. We imagine ourselves on Brad and Jen’s last vacation as a couple. We take sides in the love triangle with Angelina. We find ourselves discussing Jen’s chances of having children as if we are her reproductive endocrinologist.

Pitt and Aniston were the golden couple. They were our royals in the long, dull interim between Princess Diana and Windsor-Sussexes. They were on top when Hollywood was still a country club that celebrated almost exclusively white people and white beauty, and they have maintained their footing even as much else has changed. We have lived in parallel with them, having children and heartbreak and successes and setbacks; they’ve stuck around with us as we exchanged the Hiltons for the Kardashians, and through six terms by four presidents. In the sprawling celebrity dollhouse that we all play in, they are Barbie and Ken.

Of course we want them to be together. It would mean that everything happens for a reason! It would mean that happy endings are real! It would mean Parent Trap was right and our divorced parents were wrong! It would mean that the Laws of Love are like the Laws of Energy: that the total amount of love in the universe remains constant over time, conserved in the hearts of people we thought had long ago moved on.

Wouldn’t it be cool if life was truly cyclical? Wouldn’t it be great if life, instead of culminating in death, culminated in sex with Brad Pitt?

That’s a good fantasy. But reality is actually better.

In reality, Jennifer Aniston is one of the most popular women in the world, and she does not need to get back together with the nice-but-slightly-greasy guy she broke up with 15 years ago. In reality, the only reason this pairing is still on the table is that despite being asked about Brad Pitt no matter what she does and where she goes, Jennifer Aniston has never said one bad word about him in public. (“That was really uncool” is the meanest thing Jennifer Aniston has ever said about Jolie and Pitt, referring to them giving interview after interview about falling in love during the first couple’s marriage.)

In reality, since his divorce and coming out with his addiction struggle, Aniston hasn’t tried to seduce him. She’s supported him with social invitations and public warmth. Even though it wasn’t exactly a loving compliment, she smiled encouragingly on Sunday night when Pitt gave his SAG acceptance speech, saying that he related to his character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “who gets high, takes his shirt off, and doesn’t get on with his wife.” When asked about him that same night, Aniston said, “We’ve all grown up together; we really have. And it just feels like a really fun night to celebrate and cheer each other on and keep working.”

Folks, these extremely rich, pretty people are just trying to not be awful to each other. Their relationship is probably less like a sweeping epic love story nearing its satisfying conclusion, and more like two old friends who have buried the memories of the tastes of each other’s mouths under deeper feelings of mutual respect and understanding. We need to let the dream go, not for their sakes—their agents are probably overjoyed by these headlines—but for our own. We need to accept that things end. Things change. That we shouldn’t get weekday wine drunk and text our exes, and then be like “oh my god how embarrassing that was for someone else,” and then be like “well ha ha how are you.” We need to accept that we will live and die without seeing these hot shiny-haired actors kissing on the mouths ever again.

We need to take what we’re given instead: a woman who is the physical embodiment of Thank U, Next. Look at Jennifer in that silk dress, laughing, extending her hand, walking away. Look at her not getting back together with her ex, even though he’s literally Brad Pitt. God forbid something happens, ‘least her career is a smash.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @JeanValjenny.





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