From Harper’s Bazaar’s Laura Brown comes another floridly written celebrity profile, this time featuring Jennifer Aniston and a very large bird.
As we’ve grown accustomed to with Jennifer Aniston profiles, there’s no real reason she’s on the April cover—except to promote her terrible forthcoming film Mother’s Day, sort of hint that she might do a housewares line, discuss her fit and fabulous bod, and talk about her husband Justin Theroux, who is apparently also killing it professionally.
From Harper’s:
She is providing her easy gleam to this month’s lady-ensemble comedy, Mother’s Day (alongside Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, and a legion of other Hollywood smilers), but the future will see her in more ambitious, testing fare. Of her career, she observes, “There’s a steadiness, for sure, but also this desire to peel away more. You know, like ‘Fuck it.’ “ She laughs. “What’s a more graceful term?” Following her feted performance as a chronic-pain sufferer in 2014’s Cake, Aniston has just finished shooting The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War drama in which she plays the mother of a troubled young soldier. As with Cake, she is also a producer on the film.
The great triumph of Cake was reinforcing what Aniston had teased at all along: “I can do other things. I feel a sense of freedom that I hadn’t necessarily felt before. Also, you have to start taking chances in an industry that’s very insecure about taking chances on people.” Especially when you’ve become, as Aniston has, a megabrand. “People forget who actors are. They say, ‘You’re too known to play that part. You can’t disappear.’ And we’re like, ‘Give us a chance. We’ll disappear.’”
A reminder: Cake came out a year and a half ago, and was generally regarded as a vehicle for Aniston to get an Oscar after years of doing “safe” but financially advantageous work. She ultimately was not even nominated.
Moving on: again, please remember that even though Mother’s Day is coming out, Aniston is made of more serious stuff! Just note the ever-so-subtle juxtaposition of her admission that she’s made some bad movies with her mention that Oscar-winner Julia Roberts is also in Mother’s Day.
“I’m a bit of a people pleaser. I’ve got to stop. Some of the movies I’ve made, I bow my head in slight shame over.” However, she’s eager to work with “Julia Roberts. I had a big tease because we did a scene together in Mother’s Day, but it was a moment. And Emma Stone I’m dying to work with.” You can almost hear the repartee.
If you have not finished gagging on this sickly-sweet prose, enjoy this paragraph about Smartwater™ and Aniston’s other brand affiliations.
Of course, there’s a part of Aniston’s life that depends on her being very visible—and that’s the brand. The way she looks and lives remains as potent as ever. We’re all drinking Smartwater, moisturizing with Aveeno, and shampooing with Living Proof in the hope that some of her tawny shine will rub off. “They make Smartwater in sparkling now!” she says, laughing. “Just sayin’.”
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Image via Camilla Akrans/Harper’s Baazar
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