Jennifer Grey opens up about how anxiety kept her from Friends and Saturday Night Live

But when Barry and Mindy’s wedding came around at the end of the show’s second season, with Rachel now being Mindy’s maid-of-honor, Mindy is played by Jana Marie Hupp instead. Recently, Grey revealed in an interview with Media Village that she was asked to reprise her role, but had to turn it down because working on Friends the first time had triggered terrible performance anxiety.

She said they kept changing the script during filming, which is hard on a guest star since you’re “not a part of it and you’re really trying to figure it all out,” but they kept reworking “what the character was, what the scene was, and it was changing, and changing, and changing,” adding that it all made her so anxious that she “could barely do it.” Grey says she didn’t realize it at the time, but she was dealing with a lot of performance anxiety and didn’t know that she “needed help in the anxiety department.”

So, when it came time for Mindy to come back, Grey had to turn down the offer. Around the same time, she also had to turn down an offer to host Saturday Night Live for the same reason, saying it makes her said that she wasn’t able to do those things and that she wishes she had people around her who know how to help her “navigate that kind of fear.” Still, though, Grey says that it’s the “hard things, the really painful, difficult things” that “are the most instructive and helpful,” and she says she learns more from the things that she feels “like a failure at.”

Grey is set to return as Frances “Baby” Houseman in a 1990s-set Dirty Dancing sequel coming at some point next year.