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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!"
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!"
I don't know much about celebrities, but Vogue seems to pick the ones unworthy of a cover (at least they haven't done anything truly memorable recently.) Someone like Charlize Theron sounds more reasonable to me... She's a good actress, and not afraid to wear avant garde outfits (read: fashion relevant.)B) Natalie Portman is another good choice too.
I do agree that she's boring and has awful style. She's ruined countless Caroline Herrera dresses and I still can't figure out how she did it
. Since IMDB had it in her list as "post-production" I didn't know it had a release date yet. That's a lot better than "30 rock".
. 
Because there is so many fantastic choices out there, why be so boring?And at least do something different and innovative instead of the same bland awful even dreadful cover images.
