Sure, the ultimate Girl Next Door actually lives next to a permanent colony of paparazzi, and yeah, the relationship thing hasn’t exactly been a fairy tale. But Jennifer Aniston is in control (does that look like a body under duress?), overhauling her image (she’s ready to play a cougar!), and getting what she needs from a notorious swordsman eight years her junior (not that there’s anything wrong with that)
By Mark Kirby

It’s a sunny afternoon in late October, and Jennifer Aniston and I are having lunch inside the bright, modern Beverly Hills home she uses as an office, talking about the 24/7 unscripted drama—call it The Jen Show—whose mobile production unit is parked right out front. Arriving for our meeting, I’d watched three paparazzi SUVs speed by, rip some Grand Theft Auto–style doughnuts in the street, and station their vehicles facing downhill, positioned for pursuit. There seem to be about a half-dozen paps outside—a slow day on the set. Last week’s episode, “The One Where Jen and John Mayer Get Back Together,” drew twenty men who trailed her constantly, jockeying for those exclusive photos of the couple that have fetched as much as $20,000. Today’s crew are just staffers, guys who stalk Aniston full-time for photo agencies like X17.

“Yesterday I pulled up to one truck and rolled down my window,” she says, leaning in. “I go, ‘Let me just ask, this is every day? Every day now? Is there a way we could make this a little bit saner?’ It’s just not human to walk around with twenty cars following you—there’s no ease. Maybe they do want you to get all Mariah Carey on yourself and be put into an institution. I miss the days when they hid in the bushes.”

There’s an edge to the way Aniston jokes about the public’s obsession with her life, especially when she describes the ill will she harbors for the anonymous parasites who chronicle the burgers she eats, the gas she pumps, the trash she takes out. At one point, I mention that one of the guys out front has a ladder in the back of his 4Runner. “That’s illegal!” she snaps. The ladder, if used to peep over her towering hedges, would violate California privacy law. “I hope he hits something.” She pauses, realizing how that sounds. “It’s terrible when you wish horrible things on other human beings.”

Listening to Jen tear into the tabloid circus is entertaining stuff, and for a moment I marvel at just how lucky I am to be inside the iron gate, eating a delicious, Asian-influenced chicken-and-fried-cheese dish with one of the world’s most sought-after women, a woman who has barely talked to the press in two years…until, that is, I remember that I’ve come to Aniston’s office in large part to ask precisely the same sorts of questions—Is this thing with Mayer really going to last? Are you truly over the divorce? Don’t you just fucking hate Angelina?—that the scrum of photographers out front seek to answer with their cameras.

Huh. I guess we could talk about Halloween or some shit. But isn’t the tabloid stuff all anyone really wants to know?

* * * * *

Aniston has been really famous—25-million-viewers-a-week famous—for my entire post-pubescent life. And going into our meeting, I’d been fairly convinced that she’d be too familiar to seem sexy in person—that after years of quirky Rachel Green–esque roles, it’d be impossible to see her as anything but merely cute, or that if America’s Sweetheart did seem sexy, it’d be a Mrs. Robinson thing. Not so. Jen looks at least as young, if not younger, than she did during her Friends days, this despite her looming fortieth birthday. She looks better, too—fit and sun kissed as always, but somehow in greater possession of herself and seemingly at ease with her age. “I still can’t wrap my head around how old I’m going to be,” she says. “I feel more comfortable today than I ever did in my twenties or early thirties. I’m healthier. I’m more at peace in my mind and with my body.”

That body—well, as you can see, it defies both time and nature. I ask Jen how she felt about this cover shoot. “There is a moment when you walk in and see the wardrobe—it’s basically a tie—and you think, Where’s the underwear?” she replies with a laugh. “But it felt really good to be that comfortable with myself—and to lie on men as furniture.”

Today, Jen has a bit more to her wardrobe: jeans, sandals, and a gray tank top so form-fitting that, when she’s photographed wearing it a few weeks later, its snugness to her flat stomach is taken as evidence that she is not, in fact, the future mother of Li’l Johnny Mayer. A few weeks after our interview, she’ll make a cameo on 30 Rock, and all anyone will talk about is the French-maid outfit she wore and how perfect her legs looked draped across Tina Fey’s desk. (On whether or not the 30 Rock stint might become a regular gig, she says: “That, to me, is an ideal job: great cast, New York City. We’ll see what I say if they come back and ask me—I wouldn’t say yes, I wouldn’t say no.”)

As we finish lunch, she talks about the project she seems most excited about: a movie she’s developing called Pumas, in which she hopes to star with Elizabeth Banks.

“It’s sort of a female Wedding Crashers,” she says. “It’s these two girls who are aspiring cougars. It is so a comment on the sexual double standard—and what’s been ironic is how hard it’s been to get this movie made. Studios want it, but they’re afraid of Middle America. They’d want to change it; they’re saying, Oh, you can’t do that, people just can’t imagine you…” She’s alluding here to Hollywood’s formula for romantic comedies and her default character within them—offbeat, likable, and unlucky in love. As she talks about Pumas, you get the sense that she’s feeling a little hemmed in by the tabloid über-narrative that frames her life—the one in which her failure to remarry and procreate is a cause of Deep and Lasting Sadness—especially when that false story line gets in the way of her career.

“Look, I think all women at some level just want to rage against the machine,” she says. “There are just too many movies out there that don’t empower women—movies in which their only way of being happy is finding a man. And you know, that’s not my favorite theme.”

Right. Jen, Brad, Angelina—the “insane Bermuda Triangle,” as Aniston calls it. She and I spend about twenty minutes swirling around in this vortex, but before you follow us in, I should warn you: You may never make it out. Over the course of this discussion, there are exactly two moments when it feels as though she is offering candid, unselfconscious answers. The first is when I wonder if she has any theories on why, four years after her separation from Pitt, the story keeps selling magazines. She responds swiftly. “The funny thing is that people don’t realize we all go away to the Hamptons on the weekends.”

Yeah?

“No. But can you imagine? That’d be hysterical: I’ve got Zahara on my hip, and Knox… ”

Later, after she describes her current relationship with Pitt (“We don’t not talk. When there’s something to congratulate or celebrate, there’s always an exchange. But there’s no charge on it”), I ask whether she ever speaks to Jolie.

“No. Nuh-uh,” she says immediately—and then, as if to sweeten the message, offers a forced little tongue-biting grin.

Beyond that, her words are carefully measured. There are trains of thought that begin, then stall, then ultimately halt in smiling demurrals; requests to answer with the tape recorder turned off; facial expressions that say: I may not be answering, but, well, you can probably guess the answer. It’s all weirdly tantalizing. At one point, I ask her about some recent tabloid headlines—angelina stabs jen in the heart—and whether she truly was surprised when Jolie said she can’t wait to show her kids Mr. & Mrs. Smith because “not a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.” (In the event that you’ve had better things to do, this was the first time Jolie had publicly acknowledged that her love for Pitt began before his marriage to Aniston ended.)

It takes her seven days to fully answer. First she says, “Well, you know, that was definitely a confirmation for me of something that wasn’t quite confirmed at the time. But listen…you sit there and you… No. No daggers through the heart. I laugh. Am I surprised? Well, how do I say this?” Then she goes off-the-record for several minutes. Finally, a week later, she calls to deliver an on-the-record statement that’s brief but not without bite: “Considering the source, nothing surprises me.” She then spends a good deal of time talking about how hard she’s finding it to talk about Jolie after years of silence, this despite having given her now infamous (if hilariously understated) “That was really uncool” comment to Vogue a few weeks earlier.

So what to make of “The One Where Jen Lashes Out for the Second Time in the Six Weeks Leading Up to Her New Film!”? Well, for starters, consider that “what Jen really thinks” is a commodity worth millions in pre-opening box-office publicity. To believe that Aniston would be in any way cavalier about how she doles it out is to deny her the credit she deserves. Of course she’s aware that this “Considering the source” jab will be all over the tabloids. Of course she knows that when she answers a question like “Would you ever sell your baby photos to People?” (“No way, that’s just not something…no”), she’s also commenting on her rival.

But calculation and sincerity aren’t mutually exclusive, and I have no doubt that Aniston’s answers are genuine. In fact, after hearing her speak off-the-record, if only briefly, on the whole Pitt-Jolie saga, let’s just settle it like this: How Jen feels about Angelina is pretty much exactly how you’d think she’d feel.

Now can we please discuss the work? Aniston has two big movies coming out soon: He’s Just Not That Into You, an ensemble comedy about women struggling to find love that’s due out, depressingly, around Valentine’s Day, and this month’s Marley & Me, in which she stars with Owen Wilson—a surprisingly touching movie about a family, their yellow Lab, and mortality. “I just loved the portrait of a marriage, seeing this couple over a span of fifteen years,” she says of Marley & Me. “You have expectations—it’s all exciting when you’re young and your dreams are big and everything’s ahead of you, and then things don’t always happen the way you expect them to happen and it’s painful.”

It’s statements like this that make interviewing Aniston such a bizarre experience. Our entire conversation seems to take place on two distinct levels. On one, it’s just Jen and me—a friendly chat between a journalist and an extremely warm and gracious actress who’s simply talking about her latest film. But she is simultaneously speaking right past me, to the Oprah-watching, US Weekly–reading, movie-ticket-buying public who will interpret her remarks, once they reach the gossip ether, as a sign that her performance in Marley & Me is yet another episode in The Jen Show—one surely not to be missed. She herself does nothing to discourage that very conclusion: “My movies always seem to come at the right times. If this role had come to me a couple of years ago, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do it.”

After lunch, we move into the living room, where Jen poses with yogi-perfect posture atop a fantastically shagged white carpet while I slouch against an armchair and ask whether she’ll talk about Mayer.

“Of course,” she says cheerfully. “I’ll discuss certain things about my private life to a point, but other things are just nobody’s business.”

So what’s the deal with you two?

“We care deeply for each other, and we’re just trying to figure it out.”

You’re not having his baby, then.

“I am not having his baby. And I have not popped the question.”

Were you a fan of his music before you started dating?

“Honestly, I did not know much about him before I met him. I’d heard…you know, uh, ‘Your Body’—that song. But what I can say is that I had no idea what an extraordinary musician he is. And it’s just great to sit and be witness to that. It’s kind of like, Whoa! ”

In August, when Aniston and Mayer took some time off, there was widespread speculation that the split was, in part, because Mayer had been too loose-lipped about their relationship. He’s a blogger and prone to speaking directly to paparazzi and gossip reporters, which is something Jen avoids. There are rumors that one of the conditions of the two of them getting back together is that Mayer cuts back on the public proclamations, so I ask her:

It seems like John is a fairly self-aware guy and that he enjoys managing his own persona more than the typical celebrity—so you see him blogging or—

“Not lately, have you?”

Uh, no. Not recently. Why?

“Just…things change.”

It’s almost time to go—Jen’s expected just down the street at the new house she’s building for herself, a Balinese-inspired haven that rests on the prow of a hill overlooking West Hollywood. But before I leave, I have to ask about what she—referring earlier to the photo of her and the half-naked dudes—described as “sort of a cougar thing.” Her friend Courteney Cox has just announced a TV show called Cougar Town, there’s that Pumas movie, and of course, the younger man. Sure, it all seems a little heavy-handed, but if Jen’s trying to signal that in the next episode of her life she’ll play a fortysomething sex symbol, well, we’re certainly not going to complain.

So what gives? Do she and her friends honestly see themselves that way?

“No. Not at all,” she says with a laugh. “First of all, you need to be 40. It’s not like we’re saying, ‘Oh, you snagged yourself a young one.’ ” But then she pauses, as if there’s maybe at least a little something to it. “Look,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living by your own rules—you know, whatever blows your hair back.”

Jen gives me a hug, and I walk out of the house, down the driveway, and through the iron gate. Across the street, five paparazzi stand atop their SUVs, cameras ready; another three lie in ambush in the hedges right outside the gate. I get into my car and drive just a little up the street to a place where I can watch their quarry flee.

A white van filled with tourists on a tour of movie stars’ homes cruises past, then a Honda Pilot with a cameraman surfing on its roof, then a gigantic black Suburban. (I can’t tell whether it’s part of Aniston’s security detail or some sort of paparazzi mother ship.) After about fifteen minutes, the Beverly Hills P.D. arrives to shoo the paps down off their vehicles and, finally, Jen backs out of the driveway.

The chase is on! But it’s an absurd one: six SUVs and a cop car trailing a Prius two-tenths of a mile down the street. By the time I even start my engine, Aniston has already arrived at her new place, unscathed and unphotographed. Not so lucky is the guy with the ladder in back of his 4Runner. Halfway down the hill, in hot pursuit, he loses control of his vehicle, careens into the neighbor’s mailbox, and then—just as Jen had hoped—crashes into a tree

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