To reach Jennifer Aniston, you have to drive up and up and up, then announce yourself at a white gate that opens onto a field of gray pebbles sprouting symmetrical trees. A procession of stone slabs leads like a bridge to the massive bronze doors on an otherwise solid white facade. Aniston answers, casual in jeans and a black T-shirt. She’s disarmingly friendly. She thinks she knows another person with my name. She asks about the traffic. She leads me to her beautiful family room and kitchen, with its built-in pizza oven and glass-encased wine room, and offers to make us peppermint tea. She apologizes in advance for the texts she might get from her showrunner, because she’s a month away from shooting her upcoming show with Reese Witherspoon. While she brews the tea, I plop my bag on the counter, like we’re just hanging out. I tell her my daughter drained my phone battery right before I left the house, and so we start chatting about kids and phones. How badly they want them. When they should be allowed to have them. Do you let them feel left out, or “Do you try to save their sanity by not letting them grow up inside a teeny computer? It’s a real internal conflict,” she says, carrying the mugs to the sofa. “So much is out there.” This is true. She would know.Aniston spent a decade on Friends and has starred in more than 30 movies, but the role that sticks to her most tenaciously is America’s Suffering Sweetheart. Cast as the eternal ingenue in the never-ending marriage plot, her joys, heartbreaks, and 57,000 fictional pregnancies have kept the lights on at several tabloids for a quarter of a century. I know this character is a fiction, but she’s still an undeniable presence—a third person in the room, lounging in the hanging chair, eating perfectly cut crudités. “We live in a society that messages women: By this age, you should be married; by this age, you should have children,” Aniston says. “That’s a fairy tale. That’s the mold we’re slowly trying to break out of.”“It is a grand mystery why the public obsession has never abated,” says Kristin Hahn, her producing partner and one of her best friends. “I’ve wonderedaout it myself for many years—I think Jen represents an archetype for us as a culture.” Aniston is the screen onto which America projects all its double standards about women, especially successful ones. We first got to know her as Rachel Green, the runaway bride who moved to New York City to become herself. Then we spent a decade emotionally invested in whether she would end up with Ross, only to have her perfect marriage to Brad Pitt end soon after that. It’s obviously a lucrative projection, or it would not have been bought and sold, year after year. What anyone gets out of it is unclear. “Maybe it has everything to do with what they’re lacking in their own life,” Aniston theorizes. Or maybe using marriage and children as the ultimate marker of female happiness is just another way to disempower successful women. “Why do we want a happy ending? How about just a happy existence? A happy process? We’re all in process constantly,” Aniston says. “What quantifies happiness in someone’s life isn’t the ideal that was created in the ’50s. It’s not like you hear that narrative about any men.” Men, of course, are allowed to continue merrily on their open-ended path to adventure. “That’s part of sexism—it’s always the woman who’s scorned and heartbroken and a spinster. It’s never the opposite. The unfortunate thing is, a lot of it comes from women,” she says. “Maybe those are women who haven’t figured out that they have the power, that they have the ability to achieve a sense of inner happiness.”
he thing that’s surprisingly easy to forget about Aniston is just how powerful she is, because the amount of power she wields is at odds with her lovable image. It’s a soft, persuasive power, the kind that gets you on her side. It’s not only that she’s remarkably nice and easy to relate to, it’s that she’s smart, careful, deliberate, precise—both as a person and an actor. Anne Fletcher, who directed Aniston in her new Netflix movie, Dumplin’, says she’d be watching Aniston work and would notice a small, almost imperceptible hand gesture and think, “That’s [her character] Rosie. That’s not Jen. That is completely Rosie.” At a point when most successful actresses begin to wind down (not always by choice), Aniston shows no sign of slowing. In 2017, at the age of 48, she was ranked second on Forbes’s list of highest-paid actresses, and she makes millions a year in product endorsements. She’s about to start filming her new TV show, a dramedy about morning-news-show anchors, costarring Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, which was acquired by Apple in a bidding war. And soon she’ll appear in two more Netflix productions: Murder Mystery, with Adam Sandler, about a vacationing New York couple who become suspects in an elderly billionaire’s murder; and First Ladies, with Tig Notaro, about the first lesbian president of the United States.
