Jennifer Aniston was almost a cast member on Saturday Night Live, but she turned the offer down. During an October 2025 appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Aniston admitted, “I always thought I was such hot s---.” And this was before she became a household name on Friends.
Aniston told Shepard she had concerns about joining SNL in the early 1990s because she felt the sketch comedy series was too much of a boys’ club.
“I don’t know why I had this self-righteous attitude of ‘I don’t know if women are treated the way they should be treated on this show. It’s a very male-dominated [show]. I would love to be here if it was in the Gilda Radner day,'" she recalled.
Aniston recounted a meeting with showrunner Lorne Michaels in New York City and running into cast members David Spade and Adam Sandler outside. The actress, whose TV credits at the time included a role on the short-lived Ferris Bueller series and guest spots on Quantum Leap and Herman’s Head, admitted to Shepard she didn’t remember all of the details of her meeting with Michaels.
“I can’t remember, but I just remember Friends then happened,” she said.
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In 2011, Sandler recalled Aniston’s one-off SNL meeting. "We wanted Aniston to be on the show with us," he said during an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, per Today. "And I remember being on the ninth floor, where Lorne Michaels' office was, and seeing Jen come in. I was like, 'Oh my God, there's Aniston. Is she about to be on our show? Wow, I'm gonna be working with Aniston?'"
Sandler admitted he was dumbfounded that Aniston turned down the offer for SNL.
“Yeah,” Aniston said. “I was...you know, I had this show Friends coming up, and I thought...yeah...They thought I was making a huge mistake."
Aniston played Rachel Green for 10 seasons on Friends, from 1994 to 2004. While she never became an SNL cast member, she hosted the show twice during her Emmy-winning reign on the NBC sitcom.
During a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Aniston admitted she was “so young and dumb” when she walked into Michaels’ office decades earlier.
“I went into Lorne’s office, and I was like, ‘I hear women are not respected on this show,' " she said. “I mean, it was such a boys’ club back then, but who the f--- was I to be saying this to Lorne Michaels? So yes, adorably that happened, and I’ve hosted Saturday Night Live a couple of times, and I love it so much.”
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