Reclaiming Her Space

Jennifer Aniston is tired of being told how to make a happy life, so she's created her own narrative.

- Sandra Parmee

Ever Hollywood’s ultimate ‘sweet heart’, Jennifer Aniston cannot possibly have a mean bone in her body. It’s amusing, then, that in recent years she has played some truly heinous characters: the sexually aggressive, ill-tempered Dr Julia Harris in Horrible Bosses and its sequel, stripper Rose O’Reilly in We’re the Millers, and Carol Vanstone, a CEO who threatens to fire people and cancel the Christmas party if the staff don’t clinch a big deal, in the 2016 comedy Office Christmas Party. She enjoys these roles, though.

‘It’s so absurdly mean and unapologetic that it’s fun for someone who could barely return a meal if it was incorrect,’ she says.

Most of us know that Jen’s career really kicked off thanks to her long term role as Rachel on the hugely popular ’90s sitcom Friends, which Jen looks back on with huge affection.

‘It’s something that people have been able to carry with them. It’s comfort food, and it makes them feel better when they’re feeling down.’

When Friends ended (we’re still upset about that, by the way) and Jen’s film career took off, she tended to be typecast in formulaic rom-coms like Along Came Polly and The Break-Up. ‘I was in that box for a while, and understandably so – you don’t know what you can do until you do it,’ she says. Films like Cake (2014) and war drama Yellow Birds (2016) allowed her to explore more dramatic terrain. And the interesting thing is how much she has to offer as an actress in the more complex roles. In fact, if she weren’t an actress, Jen reckons she’d be a psychologist, because she has a knack for assessing people’s personalities.