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“I’ll Be There For You” was the theme song to Friends, which ran for 10 seasons between 1994 and 2004 — but the words also held true for the six cast members of the hit sitcom when it came to negotiating for equal salaries.

Jennifer Aniston, who won the 2002 Emmy for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Rachel Green on Friends, reflected on the importance of receiving equal pay to her co-stars — and how the show may not have lasted as long if they hadn’t.

“It would’ve destroyed us, I think, if someone was soaring financially,” the actress recently told The Wall Street Journal.

Going into Season 3 — which premiered in 1996 — Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer banded together and fought for all six of cast members to earn the same amount. The NBC series was the third-highest-rated show on television at the time when the cast reportedly “threatened not to show up for the taping of the new season’s” episodes, per a New York Times report.

According to People, each actor was initially paid $22,500 per episode in Season 1; however, Aniston and Schwimmer began making more than their castmates when Ross and Rachel’s relationship took center stage in Season 2. As a result, the two — who previously admitted to having mutual crushes on each other in the early days of the show — took a pay cut and each cast member made $75,000 per episode in Season 3.

Eventually, they all landed a whopping $1 million per episode for Seasons 9 and 10 — making them the highest-paid TV actors at the time.

Aniston previously opened up about the initial pay gap among the group while promoting The Morning Show in a 2019 interview with The Radio Times.

“I’m aware that I have had a pretty easy time in terms of my experience in the business,” she said, per The Evening Standard. “But even back on Friends, it wasn’t so much about women being paid the same as men — some of the women were being paid more.”

Aniston continued, “[The negotiations were] more about, ‘We’re doing equal work and we all deserve to be compensated in the same way.’ I wouldn’t feel good going to work knowing someone was getting x amount and I was getting something greater.”