With
two great new roles and a body that won't quit, Jennifer Aniston is
reinventing what it means to be 40 and female in Hollywood.
By Jonathan Van Meter. Photographed by Craig McDean.
Here she comes, in faded cutoffs and a tank top. Has there ever been a
more casual star? A more unrepentant Southern California girl? I am
standing in the midst of the dust and chaos—the clattering hammers, the
buzzing saws—of the massive construction project that is Jennifer
Aniston's sprawling new Beverly Hills home. It is midday in late
September, and Aniston is picking her way through the site. As she
heads toward me she looks comfortingly—almost defiantly—the same as she
always has. Long, sun-streaked hair. Check. Tanned yoga body. Check.
Toe rings and hippie beads. Check. There will be no moody movie-star
transformations, no fresh tattoos to prove how unpredictable she is.
When I arrived a few moments earlier, a big, genial security guy helped
me park my car among all the construction vehicles and then took me to
an office where a man named Phil introduced himself as Aniston's
"estate manager." An elegant fellow with a British accent, he is a
holdover from her only slightly more grand life with Brad Pitt, when
they owned a 12,000-square-foot Normandy mansion not far from here and
a big spread in Santa Barbara. "He's very…Phil,"
says Aniston with a laugh. She stops for a second and, as she so often
does, rethinks out loud. "Maybe we don't mention that I have an estate
manager." And then: "He's more like the butler."
Meanwhile I am agape, trying to take in the scale of this unusual
house; all 10,000 square feet are on one floor, and everything is of a
surprising proportion—the rooms, the doors, even the doorknobs are
bigger than you'd expect, especially for such a small person who will
soon live here all alone. As we take a tour, Aniston points out a
bathroom that looks as if it were designed for Wilt Chamberlain. The
handles on her office door are enormous bronze mudras hands from
Thailand. "I know there's a meaning to the positioning of the fingers,"
she says, "and I should know what it is, but these basically are meant
to ward off evil spirits." Then she leads me down a fantastically wide
hallway to the front doors—giant twin slabs of bronze. "This is the
best thing about this place," she says. "Look at the size of them!
They're huge! And I love this little Wizard of Oz peephole." She opens the tiny door, peeks through, and says in a Munchkin voice, "No, she will not see you!" and then slams it shut.
The house was designed in 1970 by architect Hal Levitt, best known for
the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. When Aniston bought it a couple of
years ago, it was in the middle of a renovation that was nearly
complete. But a closer inspection turned up structural problems, so she
ripped everything out and started from scratch. What she thought was
going to be a four-month project turned into a nearly two-year journey.
She seems to be loving every minute of it. As the partner in her
film-production company, Kristin Hahn, says, "She's not intimidated.
She's like the foreman! She is overseeing every single decision."
The house itself suggested a decor, one that Aniston hired interior
designer Stephen Shadley to help her execute and describes as "combo
platter": Hawaiian lanai meets Balinese Zen palace. "It wanted to have
that feeling that when you walked in you were able to throw your feet
up and just be peaceful. But I also wanted it to feel…sexy." She
narrows her eyes and shakes her hair for comic effect. "This is a sexy house!"
Indeed it is: There are acres of travertine and Brazilian teak. There
is a Japanese soaking tub, a huge indoor/outdoor fireplace, and
outside, off the vast deck with a view of Los Angeles that goes all the
way to the Pacific, a sleek, custom-designed pool with a waterfall
running its entire length. All of the public rooms in the house have
glass partitions that disappear into stone walls, turning the entire
place into one big breezeway. When I joke that it is "Jen's Balinese
Funhouse," she tells me her friends are calling it "the JA Spa."
It is hard not to think that this house is a turning of the page for
Aniston, a symbol of a brighter, shinier future, exorcised of ghosts.
She is literally building a new life for herself. But there are some
things about Aniston that never change. "About ten cars followed me up
here today," she says with not-quite-genial resignation as we pull up
chairs in a makeshift meeting room to eat a lunch prepared by her
personal chef and delivered by an assistant. "And I'm like, Really? At
this point? Today you're basically going to see me go into my office
and you're going to see me come out of my office. Eventually this
picture's going to buy you what? Lunch? A pack of smokes? Maybe not
even that anymore."
This is a joke, of course, a bit of mock humility. Or perhaps it's just
wishful thinking. Because, if anything, photographs of the comings and
goings of "Jen," as the tabs like to call her, are worth more than
ever. The post-Brad Aniston is one of the biggest tabloid stars in the
world, and her image moves a lot of magazines. Partly because she took
two years off from making films, she has been almost entirely defined
lately by the tabloids as a woman who dates younger men and spends her
days lolling around the pool in Cabo.
Woody Allen recently said in an interview that "thoughtful people don't
take the tabloids seriously. They're basically a form of
entertainment." Aniston knows this, but it still feels to her like a
cross to bear. "You basically watch my life," she says as we eat our
chopped salads. "It happens in front of you. And I can protect it and
try to control things only to a certain extent. I think what I'm doing
now is letting go of the reins a little bit and saying, 'It is what it
is.' But there is more to me than just a tabloid girl. This whole 'Poor
lonely Jen' thing, this idea that I'm so unlucky in love? I actually
feel I've been unbelievably
lucky in love. Just because at this stage my life doesn't have the
traditional framework to it—the husband and the two kids and the house
in Connecticut—it's mine. It's my experience. And if you don't
like the way it looks, then stop looking at it! Because I feel good. I
don't feel like I'm supposed to be any further along or somewhere that
I'm not. I'm right where I'm supposed to be."
Luckily for Aniston, she has two surprisingly entertaining movies
opening in succession—one on Christmas day and the other in early
February—that ought to change the conversation by reminding everyone
how wonderfully funny and moving and real she can be on-screen given
the right material. The first, Marley & Me,
is the better film—and perhaps the more important one. Aniston costars
with Owen Wilson, and the two of them do some of their best work
ever—Wilson is a true revelation. (As Aniston says, "Everything he went
through in the last year really allowed for a beautiful performance. He
arrives in this film.") Perhaps because they both have a high-strung
hippie vibe, their chemistry is lovely to behold. "They are so
captivating," says David Frankel, who last directed The Devil Wears Prada, "and it was apparent from the first second that I saw them together." If you somehow missed the hubbub about the best seller Marley & Me,
it is a memoir based on the newspaper columns of John Grogan about his
family's relationship to their neurotic dog, indeed the "world's worst
dog." Having to costar with an animal is always a dicey proposition,
but everyone comes out of this with their dignity intact.
The film begins with the couple getting Marley as a puppy and ends when
the dog dies, a narrative arc that allows the filmmakers to examine a
marriage over the course of their pet's life as the two build careers,
have three children, make compromises, and reach middle age. The studio
suggested Aniston to Frankel. "I was nervous to meet her, frankly,
because the character had to age from 22 to 40, and Jen is in her late
30s, and I kind of felt that that was a stretch," he says. "But she
came down the stairs and all of my anxiety went out the window. Within
five minutes I said, 'It's yours if you want to do it.' "
The movie is at times very funny, but let the dog-loving buyer beware:
There are some wrenching scenes. In the screening I attended in Los
Angeles, there were about 20 people, and most of them were openly
sobbing in the last half hour. But there are also many subtly rendered
moments in which Aniston's authenticity really holds the screen, never
more so than when her character discovers she's had a miscarriage. As
Frankel says, "She has no words. All the heartbreak of that moment,
which any woman would feel going through it, is magnified when you
watch Jen and you know how much she does want a family and children. My
wife said it's the most wistful movie she has ever seen. It is about
the things we wanted in life and didn't get, and yet we still have the
desire to celebrate what we do have. I think that really applies to
Jen. She's gotten more than her fair share of happiness and success,
and yet I think the reason her personal story continues to captivate us
beyond all reason is that there is a very accessible yearning in her
for something more, something intimate, something lasting."
Aniston resists drawing any comparisons to her real life, especially
when it comes to wanting children. (When I ask her point-blank about
it, she grows visibly irritated. "I've said it so many times: I'm going
to have children. I just know it.") But talking about the film does
shed some new light on her relationship with her parents. When I
mention that she is very good at portraying the bickering and fighting
of couples on film, she says, "That is so funny. I just mimic my
mother. That woman, when she got mad, was scary. I don't know if I ever
really get mad in real life. It's what my shrink was saying to me all
those years: You need to get mad! I think rage is so ugly. I just think
there's a way to be mad and discuss
it." Famously estranged for more than a decade, Aniston and her mother
are in the middle of a slow, careful reconciliation that began after
Aniston divorced Pitt. "She's changed," says Aniston. "She's humbled
with age. She fell in love. At 73 years old. I'm like, No, no, no, no,
no! I don't want to hear how great the sex is!" She puts her fingers in
her ears. "I got, I got, I got it, I got it!" (When I ask after her
father, the soap-opera actor John Aniston, she says, "He's in Topanga
Canyon, still on Days of Our Lives—my white-haired papa, handsome, gorgeous man that he is. Always asking me to do something for the Greek community.")
Aniston's feelings about her other new film, He's Just Not That into You, are—how to put it?—a little more complicated. Directed by Ken Kwapis, who has done several episodes of The Office and, most recently, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,
the film is based on the notoriously brutal advice book co-written by
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo and features a stellar ensemble cast
that includes Jennifer Connelly, Ben Affleck, Scarlett Johansson, Drew
Barrymore, Justin Long, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Bradley Cooper. The
source material itself could very easily have devolved into Hollywood
slop, but because it was developed by Barrymore's Flower Films, the
script and the performances lift it up into something unusual: a
well-paced oddball romantic comedy (sort of) with interesting things to
say about how and why men and women behave the way they do in
relationships. It is, in other words, a movie about head games.
Aniston and Affleck play a couple who have lived together unmarried for
seven years and are so natural with each other on-screen that you find
yourself thinking, Were they ever a couple? In fact, they barely knew
each other before working on this project. Affleck, who hadn't been in
a film in two years, tells me he was "dying to swing the bat again as
an actor" and jumped at the chance to work with Aniston. "She always
struck me as extremely smart, kind, and funny—and her talent is evident
to all," he says.
"I find their chemistry to be quite magical," says Kwapis. "It is one
of the secret weapons of the picture." One of their scenes—in which
Aniston essentially asks Affleck to marry her or it's over—is a
difficult emotional turning point in the film. "When she realizes that
he won't marry her, the pain she expresses—boy, I don't know. It's one
of those moments where, whatever's going on with her as an actor, it's
not a show," Kwapis says. "At that point you realize we're not in for
fluff anymore." Her costar and producer Drew Barrymore acknowledges
that Aniston is not on-screen much but plays a crucial, non-comedic
role—"It's kind of an interesting range of emotions to have in one
character," Barrymore says, "but she packs it all in."
When I tell Aniston that I really enjoyed the film, she expresses genuine surprise. "You did?"
It quickly becomes apparent that it's not necessarily that she doesn't
like the film; it's the subject matter that makes her squirm. "I liked
my story line, but…." She stammers and sputters. "I don't know. I
don't…like…girls…whining…and complaining…about…wanting a man! I never
liked Sex and the City, the kind of thing where women only
feel empowered once they find the Man. It is just not up my alley. I
don't believe in it. There is nothing you can control about love.
Somebody once said, Everything you want in the world is just right
outside your comfort zone. Everythingyoucouldpossiblywant!"
Perhaps the whole genre strikes too close to home. Two weeks after my
visit to her house in Los Angeles, we meet for dinner at a midtown
hotel in New York City. Aniston is wearing her urban uniform: low-slung
jeans, boots, big belt, black top. The place is nearly empty, which is
obviously a relief to Aniston, who seems to prefer a non-sceney
restaurant more often than not.
As we all know, ever since Aniston began dating Pitt in 1998, her love
life has never been out of the news. Their divorce only ratcheted up
the interest in her every romantic move. These days, the public
fascination with her relationship with Vince Vaughn seems almost
quaint. I ask her if there's anything else to be said about that time.
"I call Vince my defibrillator," she says with genuine affection. "He
literally brought me back to life. My first gasp of air was a big laugh!
It was great. I love him. He's a bull in a china shop. He was lovely
and fun and perfect for the time we had together. And I needed that.
And it sort of ran its course."
Most recently she's been linked with John Mayer, whom she met last
February at an Oscar party. "Barely knew his music," she says. "And
then we ran into each other a week later, and that was that." The two
began dating—Aniston flew to England to join him on his tour; they took
a well-documented vacation to Miami—and partly because of Mayer's past
relationships with Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Love Hewitt, the
paparazzi went bananas. Many people questioned Aniston's judgment;
Mayer, after all, is nine years younger and has a bit of a…reputation.
To which Aniston says, half kidding, "People need to mind their own
business! Did you ever think Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield
made sense?" She laughs, knowing that this has the potential for a good
parlor game. "Did Susan Anton and Dudley Moore make sense? Wait! I got
more! Did…did…did…Madonna and…." She trails off. "I don't want to get a
dog in that fight…but we'll think of more." We both laugh, and then she
gets more serious. "But you know, it isn't designed. Love just shows up
and you go, 'Oh, wow, this is going to be a hayride and a half.' "
After they split in August, Mayer, having been trailed for days,
famously lost it in front of the paparazzi while leaving a gym in New
York. In one of the more ill-advised moves in the history of modern
celebrity romance, he burst into a rant, saying, among other things,
"If you guys are going to…run every lie under the sun…have me as a man
who ended a relationship."
Mayer caught a lot of grief for his lack of chivalry, but Aniston
chalks up his outburst to inexperience. "He had to put that out there
that he broke up with me. And especially because it's me.
It's not just some girl he's dating. I get it. We're human. But I feel
seriously protective of him and us. Trust me, you'll never see that
happen again from that man. And it doesn't take away from the fact that
he is a wonderful guy. We care about each other. It's funny when you
hit a place in a relationship and you both realize, We maybe need to do
something else, but you still really, really love each other. It's
painful. There was no malicious intent. I deeply, deeply care about
him; we talk, we adore one another. And that's where it is."
The aspect of Aniston's tabloid persona that feels truly off base is
that she is "needy" and "clingy" and "obsessive" about ex-lovers. In
fact, just the opposite seems to be true. As evidenced from our
conversation about Mayer, she seems entirely sanguine about how
complicated and unpredictable love can be. She even seems to have made
peace with her ex-husband. When I ask if she ever speaks with him, she
says, "Yes!" in a tone that suggests that it is almost a silly
question. How is he? I ask. She looks at me for a long couple of
seconds and makes one of those classic Jennifer Aniston faces, one that
lets you know that what she is about to say is going to be…ironic. "He
seems…great?" she says. How often do you talk? I ask. "We have
exchanged a few very kind hellos and wishing you wells and sending you
love and congratulations on your babies. I have nothing but absolute
admiration for him, and…I'm proud of him! I think he's really done some
amazing things."
I ask her if she can remember exactly when the post-divorce acrimony receded. "You mean, when were Brad and I healed?" she says.
Yes, I say.
"Well, it never was that
bad," she says, knowing that it will be hard for a lot of people to
believe. "I mean, look, it's not like divorce is something that you go,
'Oooh, I can't wait to get divorced!' It doesn't feel like a tickle.
But I've got to tell you, it's so vague at this point, it's so faraway
in my mind, I can't even remember the darkness. I mean, in the end, we
really had an amicable split. It wasn't mean and hateful and all of
this stuff that they tried to create about Brad can't talk to Jen and Jen can't talk to Brad because this person won't allow it.
It just didn't happen. The marriage didn't work out. And pretty soon
after we separated, we got on the phone and we had a long, long
conversation with each other and said a lot of things, and ever since
we've been unbelievably warm and respectful of each other. Whoever said
everything has to be forever, that's setting your hopes too high. It's
too much pressure. And I think if you put that pressure on
yourself—because I did! Fairy tale! It has to be the right one!—that's
unattainable."
When I ask her about Angelina Jolie, Aniston asks me to turn off the
tape recorder for a moment. Suffice it to say, if there is never any
love gained in the first place, there can be no love lost. But she did
want to put a few things on the record. (Funnily enough, they involve
some of the same issues brought up by the recent profile of Jolie in The New York Times, in which she talks about falling in love on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.) She asks me if I ever saw a cartoon that appeared in the New York Post
a couple of years ago that depicts Aniston talking on the phone in her
kitchen. The bubble over her head says, HI ANGELINA…I DECIDED TO TAKE
YOU UP ON YOUR OFFER OF A "SIT-DOWN TALK."…In the drawing, Aniston is
loading a shotgun, and there is a copy of Vogue sitting next
to her. (The cartoon was inspired by an interview I did with Jolie for
this magazine in January 2007 in which she said she would welcome the
opportunity to "sit down" with Aniston.) Someone sent Aniston the
cartoon ("the funniest thing I've ever seen," she says), and afterward,
she could not resist the urge to buy a copy of Vogue to see
what the fuss was about. What really rankled Aniston about the piece
was that Jolie felt the need to recount a detailed timeline of exactly
how her relationship developed on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith,
while Aniston was still married to and living with Pitt. "There was
stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware
that it was happening," says Aniston. "I felt those details were a
little inappropriate to discuss." Aniston, still galled, shakes her
head in disbelief. "That stuff about how she couldn't wait to get to
work every day? That was really uncool."
Oddly enough, one of the more difficult aspects of Aniston's divorce
planted the seed for one of the most significant things that is now
happening in her life: her production company, Echo Films. A decade
ago, during the salad days of Pitt and Aniston's courtship, they
started a production company out of the garage of Aniston's best
friend, Kristin Hahn; it eventually grew into Plan B. In 2002, Brad
Grey, now the head of Paramount, joined as a partner, and the company
moved into beautiful new offices in Beverly Hills, teamed up with
Warner Bros., and began producing blockbusters like The Departed.
But once Aniston and Pitt separated, the partnership had to be
dissolved. Hahn and Aniston took some time before deciding to start
over again on their own, and now, says Aniston, "we just love it.
Finding the book, the article, the right writer. We love the process."
When I ask Hahn what it's like to work with Aniston the producer, she
says, "One of the things that people don't realize about Jen is that
she is a brilliant businesswoman. She's a working girl! She is in her
office every morning, figuring out her day and making it happen."
Aniston is eager not only to produce but to direct. "I made a short film, Room 10,
a couple of years ago and loved it so much," she says. Hahn is
convinced that Aniston will thrive at it. "In our group of girlfriends,
we always joke that she can cut hair better than anyone; she can mix a
drink better than any bartender. I think producing and directing for
her is going to be the same way. Wherever she points that wand, flowers
grow."
Appropriately enough, all the films Echo has in development right now are about—and there is no better word—ballsy women. Counter Clockwise
is a biopic about Ellen Langer, Ph.D., the first woman tenured in the
psychology department at Harvard, an iconoclast born in the Bronx who
has done controversial work on the mind-body connection, a subject
Aniston has been preoccupied with for years. The Goree Girls
is a true story about a group of women in a Texas prison in the 1940s
who formed a country-western band, became a worldwide sensation through
a prison radio show, were eventually pardoned by the governor, and then
disappeared into obscurity. (When I ask Aniston if she can sing, she
says jauntily, "I can carry a tune.")
But it is a third project, Pumas,
that is the furthest along—and the most telling about Aniston's state
of mind these days. It is a film about older women dating younger men
that Hahn describes as a "high-octane comedy about sexual politics and
double standards." Aniston's description is both funnier and cruder:
"It's sort of a female Wedding Crashers. It's about these girls who aspire to become cougars. They just paaarty!
Young party girls who just find hot young guys to play with and then
dump them. Why can't women do it?" At a time when Hollywood is obsessed
with the Judd Apatow version of the infantile, directionless
40-year-old man, it is a tantalizing notion. Aniston, after all, has
trained with the Big Boys—as David Frankel says, "What she does so
brilliantly is play great tennis with the big stars of our day: Ben
Stiller, Jim Carrey, Vince Vaughn." Why couldn't she create an
alternative by having fun with female stereotypes—not to mention
provide another option than the Carrie Bradshaw model she so detests?
There is no doubt that Aniston is noticeably more confident. Even the
prospect of turning 40 in February in ageist Hollywood doesn't seem to
faze her. "I'm not saying I'm 40. I'm 30-10. I don't feel 40. I don't
know what it means. I just know that all of a sudden it's something
that's in print next to my name. AND NOW SHE'S 40. It almost feels like
some sort of badge of honor in a weird way."
Whatever happens next, one thing is certain: We will still want to
watch her life. As Stacey Snider, the new CEO of DreamWorks, who has
known Aniston for years and is developing The Goree Girls,
observes, "She's special enough to be somewhat unattainable but real
enough that you can imagine a friendship, which is why you pursue her.
And you either pursue her as a fan reading everything there is to read
about her or you pursue her as a journalist, as you have, just
superinterested, or me as a film exec, always conscious of her work.
There's something so pretty and sunny and winning about her. You bask
in the reflection of her goldenness." She goes on, "Sometimes I think
it must be horrible for her that so many people are interested in her
every move, but I'd like to believe that a lot of that interest—not all
of it, maybe, but a lot of it—is that people love her and want the best
for her."
"Prime Time" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the December 2008 issue of Vogue.
