Yes, Jen and Gwyneth do gossip about Brad

Times

18 hours ago

She was once known as Poor Jen, whose army of fans branded themselves Team Aniston when her fiancé Brad Pitt upped and left for Angelina Jolie in 2005. Now the 56-year-old former Friends star Jennifer Aniston admits that she and her good friend Gwyneth Paltrow still gossip about the man who proposed to them both. 'How can we not?' she tells Vanity Fair this month. 'We're girls!'
It's worth pointing out that, in Amy Odell's unauthorised biography of the Goop founder, 52, also out this month, Paltrow is alleged to have described Pitt as 'dumber than a sack of shit'.
Welcome to the era of Hollywood's unfiltered over-50s — women who were previously either publicly pitied or universally loathed (often simultaneously) after media coverage painted them in a certain light but who, via social media and the internet, have found new platforms to portray themselves, if not exactly warts and all, then in a way that more closely resembles the people they are.
'There's obviously some PTSD we all have,' Aniston told Vanity Fair this week, 'which is why [interviews] scare me. I didn't have a strong enough constitution not to be affected by it [back then].'
These days, she and her cohort are broadcasting in their own right instead. Gwyneth has her Goop emails, viral vagina candles and an occasional series of Instagram reels she dubs 'boyfriend breakfasts' in which she cooks things such as 'paleo lobster Benedict' for her husband, Brad Falchuk, while dressed in luxury Italian pyjamas that cost more than your best coat.
Also on Insta, Aniston shares selfies with her dog, candid gym shots from her signature Pvolve low-impact training sessions and, yes, brand partnerships to her 45 million followers. 'My friends call me Jen,' proclaims her bio, with that very same girl-next-door likeability that proved lethal when the tabloids pitted her against the supposed femme fatale Jolie.
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'No one wanted the ladies to be friends,' supplies Aniston's pal Sandra Bullock. 'It was about pitting everyone against each other. We weren't supposed to like and respect and honour each other.'
Yet the leading ladies coterie is a catfight no longer, as those famous for being in front of the camera begin to go off-script beyond its gaze.
Aniston's Morning Show co-star Reese Witherspoon, 49, has her own book club and media production company, Hello Sunshine, which allows her not only to pick plum roles she likes the look of but to present her more homely side to 30 million people on Instagram. Here's Reese struggling to open a champagne bottle while her adoring family look on; here she is again, so winningly self-deprecating that even the dog is tired of her antics.
It goes far beyond the realm of the most-topics-off-limits celebrity interview policed to uncontroversial blandness by rottweiler Hollywood publicists in the room who might jump in to nix a bone-close question. These are still edited highlights, of course, but this version gives fans what they prize most in the internet age: relatability.
Because, even though Aniston lives in a $21 million mid-century mansion designed by the renowned A Quincy Jones with 24/7 security in the Hollywood Hills, we all still want to believe that she's just like one of us — even though, to be her neighbour, you too would need to be a gazillionaire dwelling in an ivory tower, just like her.