Jennifer Aniston Joked About Ending Friends With Therapy & Divorce

After nearly two decades on the air, the last Ellen episode aired May 26 — and who better than the show’s first guest ever to send Ellen DeGeneres off? That would be one Jennifer Aniston, who gave the talk show host some advice about ending a long-running TV show.

So just how did Aniston cope with the ending of Friends in 2004? She laughed before revisiting the era. “Well, you know, I got a divorce and went into therapy,” she said, referencing her split from Brad Pitt the following year. “Oh! And then I did a movie called The Break-Up. I just kind of leaned into the end. I just was like, ‘You know what, guys? Let’s make this a completely new chapter. Let’s just end everything and then start new.’ And it worked great.”

Indeed, since saying goodbye to that iconic (and inexplicably affordable) purple apartment on Friends, things have seemingly worked out well for Aniston — who, in 2020, took home a Screen Actors Guild Award for her work on The Morning Show, and ran into the aforementioned ex at the ceremony, where they appeared friendly and supportive of each other.

Aniston confirmed their friendship once again in 2021, telling Howard Stern that she and Pitt are “buddies,” and that “we speak, and there’s no oddness at all.”

Of course, getting here took some time — and surely, as Aniston mentioned, therapy. As she told The Hollywood Reporter in December, she had to walk out of the Friends reunion at one point, because it reminded her of the painful part of that time. “It just took me by surprise because it was like, ‘Hi, past, remember me? Remember how that sucked? You thought everything was in front of you and life was going to be just gorgeous and then you went through maybe the hardest time in your life?’”