'Also, that fact that we kept crying all our makeup off, over and over again.' She went on to say it was 'instant hysterics' when they talked out to a standing ovation from the audience of 250 of their family and friends.ДЇor Schwimmer, he was able to keep it together until their pre-show ritual huddle, saying, 'I started to lose it. 'I don't think we've ever taken more time in hair and makeup in between scenes,' Aniston said during the cast's group interview with Oprah Winfrey. 'The tears were flowing and the entire cast had to go back and have their makeup redone before starting,' Maggie Wheeler (akaВ Chandler's infamous ex, Janice) told People. I don't think this was about making people happy as much as, 'What's going to be satisfying?' For us as well.'ДЄs you can imagine, the taping of the series finale featured a whole lot of waterworks, mostly from the cast, long before their final bow. 'My rabbi would stop me when I would drop my kids off at Hebrew school saying, 'When are they going to get together?' Kauffman said. 'How do we do it so it's not justвЂ¦ boring?'

'We all knew where it was going,' Kauffman said. So they did and Rachel got off that plane, with viewers briefly believing Rachel really did chose Paris over Ross, with the co-creators acknowledging they had to try and make the inevitable ending a bit surprising for viewers. But we thought, 'No, if we're going to do it, let's do it.'' However, they did initially consider having the couple end on a slightly more ambiguous note, with Crane admitting, 'We did talk about, with Ross and Rachel, a gray area of where they aren't together, but we hint there's a sense that they might be down the road. 'We had dicked the audience around for 10 years with their 'will they or won't they,' and we didn't see any advantage in frustrating them.' 'The only thing we absolutely knew from very early on was that we had to get Ross and Rachel together,' Crane told EW. The very first thing Crane and Kauffman knew about the series' ending was that Ross and Rachel had to end up together, no questions asked. You know what I mean? We were in a position and we were able to pull it off. If you're in a position in any job, no matter what the job is-if you're driving a milk truck or installing TVs or an upholsterer for a couch-if you're in a position to get a raise and you don't get it, you're stupid. Are you worth it? How do you put a price on how funny something is?' he told Huffington Post. Were we worth $1 million? To me, that's such a strange question. Still, LeBlanc once again defended their big paydays in a 2015 interview. Since the renegotiation talks were being reported on in great detail in the press, the Friends cast received some backlash for demanding such large paychecks, with Aniston once saying in an ET interview, 'They gave us all a hard time and aren't we bratty little spoiled actors to go in and do whatever it is we did.'Д«ut just look at how much freakin' money the show was pulling in: 30-second commercials duringВ final season were going for $1 million, with the series finale's coveted spots netting $2 million, the largest advertising rate for a sitcom ever.ДЄnd the series finale was watched by 52.5 million viewers, making it the fourth most-watched episode of television in history, with the retrospective special that aired before it even earning 35 million viewers. Nobody gets near it-I don't think you're allowed to be within eyesight.'

'We wanted to be paid the same because we thought that was fair,' Aniston said in an ET interview at the time, but it also spoke to the close tight-knit bond of the cast, which never really really experienced rumors of rifts or tension during their 10-year run together, a rarity in Hollywood.ДЇor all 236 episodes, the cast members huddled together backstage just before taping kicked off, with Bright saying, 'That's one thing that has stayed consistent for 10 years, is that nobody knows what goes on in that huddle. It was unprecedented, especially because the cast banded together each time to renegotiate, a practice sitcom casts like Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory have adopted since. By the final season, all six of the superstars were making $1 million per episode-each. When Friends first premiered in 1994 with a cast of six unknown actors, they were each netting around $20,000 per episode.

Friends series online