“Friends” was an important part of Sebastian Stans life.
In the latest instalment of Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series, the “Pam & Tommy” star sits down for a conversation with Jennifer Aniston.
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Talking about their careers, Stan reveals to the “Friends” star that the iconic sitcom got him through “a lot of lonely nights.”
Aniston agreed, “It’s a friend to have in the room sometimes.”
Commenting that Stan would have been “a great cast member” on “Friends”, Aniston shares, “You would have been Joey.”
Stan then admits that his friends actually had a different character in mind for him.
“And my friends would always go around and be like, ‘Who are you most like?’ I always came closest to Chandler because I get very sort of neurotic,” he says. “And I just used to die laughing.”
Along with starring in “The Morning Show”, last year, Aniston also appeared in the long awaited “Friends” reunion special, and she now admits she didn’t expected it “to sucker punch us as hard as it did in the emotional gut.”
She explains, “We just had the idea this is going to be so fun — we’re going back to the sets exactly the way they were. And literally, every single nook on a shelf was the same. It was so creepy. But each and every one of us, we walked in, it was just like, ‘Oh!’… Time travel.”
Aniston also shares that the cast have remained close since “Friends” went off the air in 2004.
“It was ’04 when it ended. And we were different. We were so little. Our lives were ahead of us. And so much has changed,” she says. “We kind of had rose-colored glasses going into it. And then, it was like, ‘This is really a lot heavier than I thought.’ But I wouldn’t change a lick of it. Every time we all get together, it’s just like no time has passed.”
READ MORE: Sebastian Stan Recalls ‘Sweet Scene’ With Prosthetic Talking Penis In ‘Pam & Tommy’
The actress also talks about how getting shut down early in production on “The Morning Show” season 2 due to the COVID-19 pandemic affected the season.
“There was obviously no COVID when we started shooting, although there were rumblings of it. It was, like, January. We had shot for about a month,” she recalls. “All of a sudden, companies were closing and working from home. We were all saying, ‘What about the actors? We don’t have the luxury of social distancing. We’re in scenes together’… And they’re like, ‘Screw the actors.’ So we shut down. We took that time to realize that there was something missing in Season 2; it had to be completely reimagined. The same thing happened with Season 1, where we had about seven shows outlined, and the #MeToo movement happened. I feel like our show is kind of in this place where we actually deliver the news literally, as in real time.”
Stan, meanwhile, opens up about shooting the hilarious scene in “Pam & Tommy” when his character has a conversation his own penis.
“The train of thought starts to go into panic mode. It was a tricky scene to shoot, because we didn’t know if it was really going to work — if it was going to be too much or not,” he says.
“His penis is a character in the book that he wrote,” Stan says of Tommy Lee. “So the writers were tipping their hat off to that, and trying to find a creative way of how this guy would confess his love for this woman.”