Jennifer Aniston says it was hard to escape Rachel from ‘Friends’

It’s no secret that it took Jennifer Aniston more than a few years to return to television following her run as Rachel Green on the now-legendary Warner Bros. series Friends. According to the actress, that was partially because shaking the character, and proving that she could play something else, was harder than she thought it would be.In a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Aniston opened up to fellow actresses Janelle Monáe, Zendaya, Reese Witherspoon, Helena Bonham Carter and Rose Byrne about how hard it was to fight typecasting in order to take her career to that next level. “You just exhaust yourself,” she said. "I mean, I could not get Rachel Green off of my back for the life of me. I could not escape 'Rachel from Friends,' and it's on all the time and you're like, 'Stop playing that f------ show!'"The 51-year-old, who is getting Emmy nomination buzz for her work on The Morning Show (the first TV series she’s starred on since Friends), revealed that the very first time she felt like she had finally shed Rachel was when she got the role in the 2002 film The Good Girl. Her character, a discount store clerk named Justine, begins an affair with a stock boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who believes he’s the incarnation of Holden Caulfield, aka the fictional character from J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye.[video_embed id='1818994']RELATED: Jennifer Aniston reveals why morning shows are so popular[/video_embed]"The Good Girl was the first time I got to really shed whatever the Rachel character was, and to be able to disappear into someone who wasn't that was such a relief to me. But I remember the panic that set over me, thinking, 'Oh God, I don't know if I can do this. Maybe they're right,'” she said. “’Maybe everybody else is seeing something I'm not seeing, which is you are only that girl in the New York apartment with the purple walls.' So, I was almost doing it for myself just to see if I could do something other than that. And it was terrifying because you're doing it in front of the world.”The actress went on to reveal that after fighting with herself and the industry “forever” and trying to prove that she was more than one character, she’s found freedom in getting older because she just stopped caring as much. “Once you play comedy, they don't think you can do the drama; and if you're only seen as a dramatic actor, they don't think you can do comedy,” she said. “They forget that we're actors and we actually have it all in there. It's just about finding it and accessing it and getting the material.”Aniston starred as Rachel Green on Friends for 10 seasons, from 1994 to 2004. She won a Golden Globe for the role in 2003 and an Emmy in 2002, with 10 collective nominations from both awards shows over the series’ run. And while there are no plans to revive the series in any way, shape or form, Aniston will join former co-stars Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow for the upcoming HBO Max reunion special, which was delayed earlier this year but is now expected to film by the end of summer.[video_embed id='1982993']RELATED: Jen Aniston and Lisa Kudrow's mini 'Friends' reunion[/video_embed]