What a couple of years it has been for Jennifer Aniston – the hook-ups, the break-ups and the alleged Brangelina feud. So how come she’s still smiling? Nicholas Fonseca looks at the irrepressible charm of Hollywood’s sanest star.
“The great question,” the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, once asked, “is, ‘What does a woman want?’” Well, the question the world seems to have been asking since is: What does Jennifer Aniston want? If you’ve walked past a newsagency in the last five years, you’d be forgiven for thinking it is the pressing question of our era. Global financial crisis? Climate change? International terrorism? Sure, they’re big stories. You might even say they’re important. But none of them have the flaxen-haired, windswept beauty at the centre of their narrative. They don’t feature ex-husbands quite as dashing and accessible as Brad Pitt, other women as stunning as Angelina Jolie or a succession of rebound boyfriends anywhere near as easy on the eye as John Mayer, Bradley Cooper, Vince Vaughn or Gerard Butler.
o, not one of those stories comes close to entertaining the masses in quite the same way as Aniston’s personal life, which is starting to feel like it’s always with us
– even when she doesn’t have a new project to promote, a new guy to canoodle or anything at all to say about the current state of Brangelina’s union. Ever since she achieved stratospheric fame and all but gave an entire generation its most iconic hairstyle (who among you didn’t try to rock The Rachel, at least once?), Aniston has been held up as the living embodiment of womanhood’s hopes, dreams, fears and anxieties. But it’s safe to say that she doesn’t want to be that person at all. A mere poke around Google yields thousands of unsubstantiated rumours about her personal life: she’s hired a matchmaker! She still rendezvous with Brad! She purposely “ripped off” Jolie’s thigh-high slit dress at this year’s Golden Globes! “Everyone’s got an opinion. I wish they didn’t,” Aniston has said. “[I] can’t do anything without it going to some extreme … Good God. You have to laugh at it all at the end of the day.
She is laughing − all the way to the bank. Even now, there remains a misconception that her career in movies, following 10 insanely successful, highly paid years on Friends, has somehow been a disappointment. That’s despite the fact her box-office takings total more than $1.5 billion. Jennifer Aniston is actually doing just fine, thank you very much, and she’s back on point this month in The Bounty Hunter, a romp in which she plays reporter Nicole Hurly, the ex-wife of titular seeker Milo Boyd (Butler), whose next assignment is to track her down because she’s jumped bail. Since this is a romantic comedy, there are bungles, mishaps and pratfalls galore and, inevitably, the duo ends up on the run together. And just like old times, the barbs start flying, the sparks start crackling and love is once again in the air. The comparisons to Mr & Mrs Smith are inevitable, not least because Aniston and Butler display such an easy, breezy chemistry when they share the screen. Their chummy relationship off-camera has already been its own form of entertainment for months: in a time-honoured tradition, the leading lady has once again been romantically linked to her current co-star – and everyone is playing along, breathlessly watching and wondering if this coupling will last longer than the one before.
For reasons too numerous to list in this story, we like to tell ourselves that Aniston, despite the fame, fortune and impossibly good looks, is one of us. Bruce Almighty co-star Jim Carrey once said of her headline-making life: “You look at all those magazines you see her in and you just go, ‘Why are people interested in this person?’ They just never seem to get enough. Then you meet her and you go, ‘There’s a reason. This is a very cool, centred person.’ A lot of times you meet [those] people, you’re disappointed at the reality of them. The idea is always better … She’s just being herself.”
Indeed, part of Aniston’s popularity is that if she happens to gain a few kilos, if she falters on the job by making a bad movie or if even she can’t keep Mr Perfect in her clutches, then we feel it’s okay if it happens to us, too. “[Her break-up with Brad Pitt] was national news on a level that’s not fair to anybody”, said her Rumour Has It… co-star Shirley MacLaine. “Jennifer’s emotional discipline to keep it together was really extraordinary. I don’t know how she did it.”
Aniston is now 41, an age when a woman is told that unless she is commanding a corner office, happily married and raising well-adjusted children, firming her already-taut tummy in daily Pilates classes and living in an impeccably decorated mansion, she’s doing something wrong. But here’s the truth: nobody, not even Aniston, can achieve that sort of perfection. To this day, in fact, there are certain circles in which she is still blamed for the break-up of every single one of her relationships. The scuttlebutt about the failure of her marriage to Pitt remains the most venomous: he left her because she didn’t want to bear his offspring.
All that nasty talk, all those ridiculous rumours, they’re why we barrack for Aniston. They’re why we see her movies. They’re why we cheer her on and read about her hook-ups and why we can’t wait to see how stunning she’ll look the next time she appears on the red carpet. All the Hollywood madness aside, she’s still just a nice Greek-American girl from the ’burbs, that chatty, laid-back friend you hoped would show up when you sent out that Facebook invite for an afternoon of chippies and wine. Perhaps Jennifer Aniston just wants us to let her be Jennifer Aniston. Isn’t that more than enough?