Jennifer Aniston: A Fresh Start With ‘Marley & Me’

Paparazzi climb walls to snap her photo. Her ex and his girlfriend (a.k.a., Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) stare out from magazine covers everywhere. And her movie career could use a little bite. Three words of holiday cheer: Get a dog!

By Josh Rottenberg
Josh Rottenberg
Josh Rottenberg

She misses the days when they hid behind bushes. Then, at least, she could enjoy the illusion that she was free from their telephoto lenses. Now the paparazzi are always there in the open — staked out at the bottom of her driveway, climbing the walls of a restaurant patio where she’s eating — like zombies in a George Romero movie. Needless to say, Jennifer Aniston’s standard of what constitutes a private moment is not like most people’s. ”The way I gauge it is, are there six cars behind me today or not?” she says.

Even now, in a quiet Beverly Hills hotel suite, with a bodyguard nearby, she knows she’s hardly in a bubble. She’s well aware that, even when no flashbulbs are popping in her face, her slightest move sends ripples across the gossip universe. The latest involves a date she went on the other night 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!” she says, throwing up her hands. ”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, 39, would love nothing more than to keep the thunder focused on her upcoming Christmas Day release, Marley & Me, a three-hankie (and one pooper-scooper) adaptation of writer John Grogan’s best-selling memoir, in which she stars opposite Owen Wilson and an unruly Labrador retriever. It’s been two and a half years since her last film, the romantic comedy ] The Break-Up, a period during which — aside from popping up as a psycho sexpot on 30 Rock last month — Aniston, the actress, has been overshadowed by Aniston, the tabloid icon. Marley & Me, 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 clunkers 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, though, the focus can all too easily drift away from your work, and sometimes in a big way. 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 girlfriend Angelina Jolie. The tabloids let loose a barrage of four-alarm headlines: ”Furious Brad: Shut Up, Jen!” ”How Angelina Tortures Jen.”

”[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 — which referred to comments Jolie made last year about falling for Pitt on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, when he was still married to Aniston — 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.”

Truth is, with her hair still wet from a shower and her face free of makeup, Aniston, who’s curled into a corner of a couch as if trying to make herself as small a target as possible, does look a tad bummed. Yes, she’s still as funny and charming as one would hope, given her long-standing status as America’s designated BFF. She’ll tell you 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.” But at the same time, there’s a certain wariness in her eyes, an occasional flash of indignation — a sense that, as the Friends theme song goes, no one told her life was gonna be this way. 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. The weight of all that scrutiny is clearly a lot to carry on her small shoulders.

”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, trying to feel her way to the right metaphor. ”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, assuming that it would just be a cloying, gauzy dog movie — the cinematic equivalent of one of those inspirational posters showing a kitten clinging to a tree branch. ”My dad and a couple of other people gave me the book, but I didn’t give it a second glance,” she says. ”I thought, A book about a dog? It’s like one of those little books you might see in a basket in a bathroom.”

The idea of playing a mother also gave her some pause. ”Jen had some anxieties about preparing,” says director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada). ”You have crying babies, the kinks and stresses of being a young, exhausted mom — a lot of stuff she hadn’t been through personally or acted before.” In the end, Aniston 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 Marley & Me 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 own wide-eyed dreams from the moment in 1994 that she vaulted from waitressing jobs and failed sitcoms to the role of a lovable ditz on NBC’s smash hit Friends. The next decade passed in a blur of breathless stories about her status as America’s sweetheart, her much-imitated hairstyle, her eye-popping salary, her storybook 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, Aniston suddenly became the central character in a real-time reality show — the good girl dumped by the hunk for the femme fatale — that captured the public’s imagination to a degree that went far beyond the usual tabloid rubbernecking.

”’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— 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.”

For the next year, the actress’ travails seemed to play out on a split screen, with tabloid stories mirroring Aniston’s movie titles. Even she finds the parallels grimly funny: ”They were so obvious,” she says, ticking them off in a singsongy voice. ”There was Rumor Has It! Then there was Derailed! Then there was The Break-Up!” Some of her more ardent fans took to sporting T-shirts reading ”Team Aniston” — a gesture of support she didn’t exactly welcome. ”I can see how that would be flattering,” she says. ”But that divide-and-conquer thing is stupid. It’s just catty. I’m not catty.”

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— in her Wheaties? How do these people get the opportunity to just spew s—? 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.”

Like it or not, those expectations are simply part of the bargain for Aniston, says Nancy Juvonen, producer of her next movie, the ensemble romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You, due Feb. 6: ”You’re beautiful, everyone adores you, you get to be a gazillionaire, you never wait on line, and everything is free — but you’re going to be followed around and every time you blow your nose it’ll be in a magazine. She can’t even brush her hair out of her face without someone saying she’s bawling. That’s a huge price to pay.”

Big, shiny romantic comedy projects still come thudding onto her doorstep on a daily basis, but nearly all of them elicit an automatic no. Aniston has played enough girlfriends to last her a lifetime. Her greatest creative fulfillment — and greatest critical 
 acclaim — has come from her least expected roles: the sullen, soulful retail clerk in 2002′s The Good Girl; the aimless, pot-smoking maid in 2006′s Friends With Money. ”The girl trying to get the guy — those movies just don’t interest me these days,” Aniston says. ”I’d be so bored just doing that. I always think of it as you’re walking down the aisle of the supermarket and there’s the Fruity Pebbles. I like to do a little Kashi as well, a little granola.”

Since The Break-Up, under the auspices of her newly formed production company, Echo Films, Aniston has thrown herself into developing a range of projects that seem designed to upend audience expectations, including a biopic about the first woman tenured in psychology at Harvard and another true story about an all-female country & western band that formed in a Texas prison. But of course, what she would really like to do is direct. She already has a particular project in mind: ”It’s about schizophrenia, a woman who overcame the odds against her — that’s all I’m going to say.” Would she also star in it? ”Oh, no, that sounds like torture,” she says, laughing. ”I’d never get myself out of the trailer.”

In the meantime, Aniston’s offscreen private drama continues to drag on, as an insatiably curious public gropes toward some as-yet-unseen climax: a wedding, a birth, an epic catfight, a cathartic group hug. But while the public may continue to howl for an untold number of curtain calls in that sudsy story line, 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 quietly. ”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.”

Still, when the room is filled with so many elephants, it’s inevitable that she’ll bump into one at some point. Through a long and otherwise unguarded conversation, Aniston never once lets any one of several loaded proper nouns — Brad, Angelina, Vince Vaughn, John Mayer — pass through her lips. At one point, while recounting a story about an ex-boyfriend who gave her a disobedient dog for Valentine’s Day (”Note to self: Don’t give dogs as gifts unsolicited,” she says), she accidentally lets the name Tate — as in Donovan — slip out, then immediately catches herself: ”I’m sorry — I mean, my ex-boyfriend.” After all this vigilance, when it is pointed out that Marley & Me is opening the same day as Pitt’s new movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Aniston winces, as if she’s been cornered. She lets out a long, theatrical groan. ”Oh, you had to go there! I thought we were out of the woods.” She sighs. ”I want [Button] to do great. I’ve seen about an hour of it. It’s amazing. Amazing.”

She gets up from the couch and braces herself to head back into the fray. She knows the photographers are waiting for her. She’ll soon start huddling with her bodyguard to prepare an exit strategy. But first, a Zen koan. ”Someone said to me, if a tabloid happened in the woods and no one was there to read it, did it happen?” she says. She lets that question hang in the air, unanswered and unanswerable.

Source: EW.com

Can anyone scan it and send it to me, please? anistononline@gmail.com