Jennifer Aniston is 54 years old, and there are certain things she just knows how to handle. For example, the paparazzi: In a new profile in the Wall Street Journal, Jon Hamm recalled pervasive paps trying to get a rise out of Aniston as the two filmed a Morning Show scene on the New York City streets. “It’s like having a fireworks display go off five inches from your head,” he said. Aniston, seasoned by decades of hounding, was unfazed. “She just handled it with such grace and as much humour as you can.”
She also knows what she wants in a dirty martini, which would be a pimiento-stuffed olive. She carries her own in her luggage on trips abroad, she said, after an upsetting language barrier led to a kalamata olive being plopped into her drink.
Things weren’t always like this, though. She wasn’t always the decisive, in-charge actor, producer, and person she is today. Aniston described splitting from Brad Pitt in both marriage (never forget the caviar wall) and business when they divorced in 2005, leaving her stake in Plan B, their production company. After her departure, the shingle gained Oscar nominations and prestige, and Pitt gained a lot of money. She called leaving Plan B to Pitt “the only decision. And not in a negative way. It just was what was right at the time.”
If she sounds nonchalant about it, she’s not, really. She described “a real shift in my life in terms of coming out from under the rubble of [her divorce from Pitt]” and turning to work as “a real place of solace.” She switched managers, taking on Aleen Keshishian and re-learning negotiation and business behaviours.
“There was a time in my world, my career, where I realized it’s not being aggressive or combative or bitchy or emotional to stand up for what you deserve and what you want,” she said. “It’s a tough muscle to build. And also be loved and respected. It’s hard to achieve.”
As for love, she had another romantic split in 2018, parting ways with Justin Theroux. She’s been levelling up her career, she said, but romance is still tricky.
“I’m really good at every other job I have, and that’s sort of the one area that’s a little….” she said. It goes back to being a kid. “My parents, watching my family’s relationship, didn’t make me kind of go, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to do that,’” she said. “I didn’t like the idea of sacrificing who you were or what you needed, so I didn’t really know how to do that. So it was almost easier to just be kind of solo. So I didn’t have any real training in that give-and-take.”
Aniston has stories aplenty from her long career (and props; she said she still wears Rachel’s infamous red loafers from her Friends days), and a long memory, though she says she’s “so over cancel culture.”
“I probably just got cancelled by saying that,” she said. “I just don’t understand what it means.… Is there no redemption? I don’t know. I don’t put everybody in the Harvey Weinstein basket.”
Nothing inappropriate ever happened with Weinstein, she said, though she wasn’t a fan.
“He’s not a guy, you’re like, ‘God, I can’t wait to hang out with Harvey.’ Never. You were actually like, ‘Oh, God, OK, suck it up.’ I remember, actually, he came to visit me on a movie to pitch me a movie. And I do remember consciously having a person stay in my trailer.”
As firm as she is on professional matters these days, Aniston also admitted she’s game to experiment when it comes to beauty. Salmon-sperm facial? Fine, let’s try it.
Is this what the kids call “balletcore?”
“First of all, I said, ‘Are you serious? How do you get salmon’s sperm?’” They apparently got the sperm. She tried it. It doesn’t sound like she’s swimming in that stream again. She’s more of a peptide injection gal, calling it “the future.”
All these years later, a Hollywood force in her own right, salmon sperm facials and all, Jennifer Aniston said, “I feel like I am a self-made woman.”
And for an A-lister who has been linked to other A-listers, she has an answer about those romantic prospects. Winkingly: “My dog. That’s who I’m sleeping with.”
This article was originally published by Vanity Fair.
