Jennifer Aniston has a new outlook

Jennifer Aniston has a new outlook



Jennifer Aniston has a new outlook, and Entertainment Weekly takes a look at the journey she has been on and the fresh start she has now with a surefire hit in Marley & Me.

It is certain that Aniston’s standard of what constitutes a private moment is not like most people’s. Paparazzi climb walls just to snap photos of her; her ex-husband and his lover stare out from magazine covers everywhere; and her slightest move sends ripples across the gossip universe. The latest involves a date she went on with her boyfriend, singer John Mayer, at which she supposedly abstained from alcohol. Ergo, according to the logic that rules the tabloid world, she must be pregnant. With twins. “Oh my God, it’s hysterical!” Aniston says. “You can’t do anything without it going to some extreme. It’s almost going to take away the fun from actually being able to say one day, ‘I’m pregnant!’ Everyone will be like, ‘Yeah, right.’ It’s the boy who cried wolf. Stop stealing my thunder, motherf---ers!”

For now, Aniston would love nothing more than to keep the thunder focused on her upcoming Christmas Day release, Marley & Me, a three-hanky adaptation of writer John Grogan’s bestselling memoir, in which she stars opposite Owen Wilson and an unruly Labrador retriever. This film, with its built-in fan base and cute-as-a-puppy holiday appeal, represents her best bet to get her often wobbly movie career back on solid footing. “Sometimes you’re not always so thrilled about the movie you’re pushing,” she admits, whistling past a graveyard of flops like Rumor Has It and Derailed. “But this is a good one.”

When you’re an actress whose personal life has fed an entire industry, the focus can all too easily drift away from your work. Early last month, excerpts from a Vogue profile of Aniston exploded across the Internet, and, with a single quote on the cover – “what Angelina did was very uncool” – a nation that had been fixated on presidential politics suddenly switched the channel back to the soap opera involving the actress, her ex-husband Brad Pitt, and his current girlfriend Angelina Jolie. “[Election night] was just so moving, so unbelievable,” says Aniston. “And now what do people do? Read my crap! Everything comes to a halt: ‘What did she say?’” She shakes her head, smiling wryly. “Good God. You have to laugh at it all at the end of the day.” Still, she clearly feels stung by the flap and insists the “uncool” quote was taken out of context. “I was just surprised that Vogue would go so tabloid,” she says. “I was bummed. But you almost expect it. Big Deal. Done. Next.”

Aniston is still as funny and charming as one would hope, and she’ll quickly say that, as she approaches 40, she’s never been happier, never felt better: “I don’t know if I’m just a late bloomer, but I feel like everything is just beginning.”


After nearly a decade and a half of massive fame, Aniston has become something more than just an actress. She’s a walking inkblot test and, depending on your perspective, you could see her as a wounded, jilted victim or a strong, independent woman, an actress who's best suited to the small screen or one whose great charisma and natural comedic gifts are perpetually underappreciated. “Everyone projects their thoughts on you,” she says. “Everyone’s got an opinion. I wish they didn’t. I’ve gotten to the point where, if I focus on all of that stuff, I won’t make a move, you know?” She pauses. “There’s this character – it’s like my Hannah Montana,” she says. “That’s how I feel. There’s my Hannah Montana and then there’s me.”


Aniston passed on Marley & Me the first time it came around, and the idea of playing a mother for the first time gave her some pause, but in the end, she embraced the challenge: “I feel like that’s in my future and I’m on the verge of it in some way—or it’s something I long for. So it was great to sort of dip your toe in it.”

Ultimately, though, it was the chance to explore the ups and downs of married life that drew Aniston into the movie, turning the film into something more personal than it first appeared. “What was interesting was the story of these two people, how it doesn’t always look so pretty,” she says. “You have your ideas and your dreams when you start out and you’re sort of wide-eyed and bushy-tailed as a young married couple. Then life unfolds and it doesn’t always take you in the directions you hope that it will.”


Aniston seemed to be living out her wide-eyed dreams from the moment she landed the role of a lovable ditz on NBC’s smash hit Friends in 1994. The next decade passed in a blur of stories about her status as America ’s sweetheart, her much imitated hairstyle, her eye-popping salary, her story-book marriage to Pitt, her burgeoning movie career. And then, in 2005, the wheels came off with the dissolution of her marriage and the revelations about Pitt’s relationship with Jolie. “’The Hollywood fairy tale romance’—that’s what’s put onto it,” Aniston says of her marriage to Pitt. “It’s Luke and Laura. But if you strip away all of the glitz and the glamour and the headlines—the shock and awe of it—it’s just people living their life. S—t happens, and it’s as normal as any other human being if you take away the headlines. It’s just not as interesting without the headlines.” Still, when Entertainment Weekly brings up the fact that Marley & Me is opening the same day as Pitt’s new movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, she sighs and says “I want [Button] to do great. I’ve seen about an hour of it. It’s amazing. Amazing.”

Meanwhile, Aniston’s career continued to lose altitude. In 2006, New York Times critic Caryn James wrote a blistering piece on the actress, asking, “How did her career go haywire so fast?” and criticizing everything from her film choices to her taste in men. “It was so venomous,” Aniston remembers. “It was like, who f---ing s—t in her Wheaties? How do these people get the opportunity to just spew s—t? They don’t know anything. You know, career choices—you just do what you do. Not everyone’s a winner. Not every episode of Friends was great. Not every guy you choose is great. Just across the board, there’s so much expectation.”


Aniston’s offscreen private drama continues to drag on, but while the public may continue to grope toward some as-yet-unseen climax (a wedding, a birth, an epic catfight, a cathartic group hug), Aniston says she’s ready to take her final bow as the gossip world’s anointed Queen of Pain. “It’s my history,” she says. “It’s my memory. That’s all it is to me: something that happened, something that was really quite poignant and good in the long run.”