Saying goodbye to Friends wasn’t just hard for fans, it was hard for the actors too. Matt LeBlanc recently opened up about what it was like to finish filming the iconic sitcom after 10 years — and revealed it caused him to start smoking cigarettes again.
“I had quit smoking and the last episode, I started smoking again,” LeBlanc said during an appearance on the Norwegian-Swedish television show, Skavlan, on Friday, February 16. “It was very sad.”
“You know you like to think that your career is always going to go [up],” the Episodes star, 50, continued. “And I think it was, and not in bad way, but I think it was hard to imagine success beyond that. And it was this sort of closing of a chapter in all of our lives that was amazing. There’s only five other people on the planet that know what that was like, to have been a part of [it].”
Friends, which also starred Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer, aired on NBC from 1994 to 2004. The series has maintained its popularity through multiple networks airing reruns and fans watching the show on Netflix.
“I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘My mom had cancer and the only thing that lifted her spirits was watching Friends. I went to school abroad and had no friends, you guys were my friends. I got divorced and I thought the world was over, but you guys made me smile,’” LeBlanc said. “I mean I’ve heard all kinds of things like that and to be able to come into people’s lives and make them laugh, I think comedy in a way is humanity’s band aid.”
Skavlan airs on Fridays in Norway and Sweden.
