Jennifer Aniston's candid admissions about ‘love triangle' divorce from Brad Pitt
The former Friends golden girl has spoken to Vanity Fair about life after Brad, trading advice with former Pitt partner Gwenyth Paltrow, and her dismay over tabloid media stories that keep her behind closed doors in the Los Angeles hills.
In a revealing interview with the same magazine soon after their split, Aniston shocked the world and delivered a racy exposé titled The Unsinkable Jennifer Aniston, as an exclamation mark to end the five-year marriage.
Wearing only a men's button-down shirt, with underwear and thigh-high boots, the post-Pitt interview was as memorable for its imagery as its content and signalled a release for Aniston, albeit at a cost.
'I haven't looked at that article in forever,' Aniston says.
'I just remember the experience of doing it, which was kind of jarring. It was also such a vulnerable time. But yeah, that was one for the memoirs.
'Journalism back then felt more like a form of a sport.
'There's obviously some PTSD we all have, which is why these (interviews) scare me.
'How are they going to misinterpret my words or take something out of context? And one line nowadays…,' she adds.
They say time heals all wounds, but the bounce back from a time Aniston describes as her 'love triangle' period, as Brad Pitt's blossoming relationship with Angelina Jolie burst into the spotlight, has been a slow burn.
Her mantra to ward off the suffocating gaze of paparazzi and online gossip columnists: 'Just pick yourself up by the bootstraps and keep on walking, girl', she tells
Vanity Fair.
'It was such juicy reading for people. If they didn't have their soap operas, they had their tabloids.'
'It's a shame that it had to happen, but it happened. And boy did I take it personally.'
'I didn't have a strong enough constitution to not get affected by it. We're human beings, even though some people don't want to believe we are,' she said.
Aniston's relationship with Pitt has rekindled over time and fans have been heartened to see the pair chat together on podcasts and meet happily at awards ceremonies.
'I will love (Brad) for the rest of my life. He's a fantastic man. I don't regret any of it, and I'm not going to beat myself up about it,' she says.
Friendships with other Hollywood royalty have blossomed during the years, and her relationship with Paltrow holds a special bond.
When asked if the pair discuss their respective time spent with Pitt, the answer comes with ease.
'Oh, of course,' Aniston says.
'How can we not? We're girls.
'We're always swapping advice —'What are you doing for this? What are you doing for that? Do you have a new doctor for that?''
Another close friend Sandra Bollock says Aniston's ability to bounce back from adversity over the years has turned her into a wonderful friend.
'I think her superpower is that she could very easily be hard, but she's incredibly open,' Bullock says.
'People want to know about her and understand where she is in life and want her to be happy.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Perth Now
2 hours ago
- Perth Now
Jennifer Aniston 'fought for her Horrible Bosses wig'
Jennifer Aniston "fought" to wear a wig in Horrible Bosses. The 56-year-old actress played the flirtatious Dr. Julia Harris in the 2011 comedy movie, and Jennifer has revealed that her brunette wig was a point of contention before the cameras started rolling. The Hollywood star told Vanity Fair: "I fought for that wig, by the way. That was not an easy battle. "I wanted her to look different. And the argument from the studio — I'm sorry to call you out — was that, 'We're just afraid it won't look like you.' And I said, 'That's kind of the point.'" Jennifer - who starred in the movie alongside the likes of Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx - doesn't have any regrets about the wig. The actress said: "I just still think it might look a little bit like me, but I'm glad I fought for it, and I stuck to my guns." Jennifer is best known for playing Rachel Green in Friends. However, she relished the challenge of playing the flirty dentist in Horrible Bosses, noting that her character was "so far away" from her real-life self. She said: "I think I was always seen as the girl next door, the ingenue. "It was fairly fun to play somebody like this, because it's so far away from anything that I am. And I think that's what the director liked, was that, 'Oh, this is so not what we would expect from this gal'. "That was the fun of it, though. I think that's what made it more creatively exciting for me, obviously. I remember when I read this script, I was pretty excited about it." Jennifer's distinctive haircut in Friends - which was known simply as The Rachel - proved to be hugely influential in the 90s. However, the actress previously admitted that she wasn't a fan of the style. She told Marie Clare magazine in 2013: "The Rachel was ... horrible and ... high maintenance." Jennifer also joked that she felt frustrated with her hairstylist Chris McMillan at the time. The actress likened maintaining the style to undergoing "surgery". She quipped: "I'd curse Chris every time I had to blow-dry."
The Advertiser
14 hours ago
- The Advertiser
Four arrests after Brad Pitt's LA home ransacked
Four people have been arrested in connection with a burglary earlier this summer at a Los Angeles home reportedly owned by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, police say. Officers responded June 25 to a break-in at the house in LA's Los Feliz neighbourhood. Police said at the time suspects broke in through the front window, ransacked the home and fled with miscellaneous property. Detectives have made four arrests, Officer Drake Madison said. He said the suspects' names could be released later in the day. Officials could not identify who owned or lived in the home, and no information was available on what was stolen. Pitt reportedly bought the property for $US5.5 million ($A8.4 million) in April 2023, according to Traded, a commercial real estate website. A representative for Pitt declined to comment. Pitt had been out of the US in June on a globe-spanning promotional tour for his new movie, F1. Four people have been arrested in connection with a burglary earlier this summer at a Los Angeles home reportedly owned by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, police say. Officers responded June 25 to a break-in at the house in LA's Los Feliz neighbourhood. Police said at the time suspects broke in through the front window, ransacked the home and fled with miscellaneous property. Detectives have made four arrests, Officer Drake Madison said. He said the suspects' names could be released later in the day. Officials could not identify who owned or lived in the home, and no information was available on what was stolen. Pitt reportedly bought the property for $US5.5 million ($A8.4 million) in April 2023, according to Traded, a commercial real estate website. A representative for Pitt declined to comment. Pitt had been out of the US in June on a globe-spanning promotional tour for his new movie, F1. Four people have been arrested in connection with a burglary earlier this summer at a Los Angeles home reportedly owned by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, police say. Officers responded June 25 to a break-in at the house in LA's Los Feliz neighbourhood. Police said at the time suspects broke in through the front window, ransacked the home and fled with miscellaneous property. Detectives have made four arrests, Officer Drake Madison said. He said the suspects' names could be released later in the day. Officials could not identify who owned or lived in the home, and no information was available on what was stolen. Pitt reportedly bought the property for $US5.5 million ($A8.4 million) in April 2023, according to Traded, a commercial real estate website. A representative for Pitt declined to comment. Pitt had been out of the US in June on a globe-spanning promotional tour for his new movie, F1. Four people have been arrested in connection with a burglary earlier this summer at a Los Angeles home reportedly owned by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, police say. Officers responded June 25 to a break-in at the house in LA's Los Feliz neighbourhood. Police said at the time suspects broke in through the front window, ransacked the home and fled with miscellaneous property. Detectives have made four arrests, Officer Drake Madison said. He said the suspects' names could be released later in the day. Officials could not identify who owned or lived in the home, and no information was available on what was stolen. Pitt reportedly bought the property for $US5.5 million ($A8.4 million) in April 2023, according to Traded, a commercial real estate website. A representative for Pitt declined to comment. Pitt had been out of the US in June on a globe-spanning promotional tour for his new movie, F1.
Sydney Morning Herald
14 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch went to war. Then the fun started
From the start, this interview is in grave danger of running completely out of control. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch are here to talk about their roles as a disintegrating couple in Jay Roach's The Roses which – just to put this right up front – is a comic tour-de-force for the both of them. Our slot is short (although, since nobody is prepared to stop talking, we run over time) and supposed to be strictly 'film-focused', but somehow we jump from what Colman is seeing tonight at the theatre (Fiddler on the Roof) to TV shows they're both watching, with some insider tips from Colman on the best episodes of The Bear. They interrupt and talk over each other. 'I'm sorry,' says Colman, genuinely apologetic. 'We haven't seen each other today.' They were friends, but had never worked together before making this film. Of course, they are two of the brightest stars in the British film firmament: Colman won the Oscar as best actress in 2019 for playing a fabulously vulgar Queen Anne in The Favourite, while Cumberbatch is Sherlock, Dr Strange and a good many other dramatic characters. They are also, unusually for any kind of star, middle-aged: Colman is 51, while Cumberbatch is 49. 'Luckily, we've managed to stay friends,' Colman said in a similarly freewheeling interview in Vanity Fair. 'That's the fear: that you like each other, and what if you don't get on when you're actually on set? But it was lovely.' The Roses is ostensibly a remake of the 1989 critical and commercial hit The War of the Roses. It was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It was not lovely; watching it now, it barely feels like a comedy at all. At its centre was a wealthy couple whose marriage was rapidly souring into a permanent state of rage. Nobody in it was remotely likeable. Douglas plays Oliver, an ambitious lawyer with more than a whiff of Gordon Gekko about him. His trophy wife Barbara – a former gymnast – expends far too much creative energy on constructing the perfect home, learning to hate him along the way. Worst of all – spoiler alert – their dog is a casualty of their fighting. Once you kill off a canine character, you're on different turf. The source material for both films was a 1981 novel by prolific popular fiction writer Warren Adler. Cumberbatch read that too. 'It's really bleak,' he says. 'It's really a diminishing thing from what the story was named after, which was obviously a bloody civil war, to the book which was brilliant but incredibly dark.' He thinks he first saw the Douglas-Turner film in his teens; he watched it again before they started making The Roses. 'I remembered it as much funnier,' he says. 'But then I was young and I hadn't had a relationship. I look at it now and go wow, that's pretty … tough and awful.' The Roses strikes such a different note that they don't see it as a remake. Theo and Ivy are equal partners – he is an architect, she is a chef – whose equality is sundered when she opens a restaurant that becomes the buzziest of the year. As Ivy makes the leap into TV stardom, Theo's career nosedives after an unfortunate accident with a misjudged roofing feature. With nothing to do, he sets about building his dream home on a clifftop block Ivy has been able to buy. Ivy, meanwhile, becomes the family provider and outsider, forlorn when she sees how marginal her parenting role has become but too over-committed to do anything about it. Loading The script is the work of Australian writer Tony McNamara, who wrote The Favourite along with the television series The Great and Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' wild follow-up to The Favourite, Poor Things. 'What Tony has done is take it somewhere else,' says Colman. 'There is more love in it.' The central relationship is full of wit, fun and warmth; when it morphs into hostility, the smart dialogue gives way to a crazed mayhem that could have been devised by Buster Keaton. 'When you're watching it, you're rooting for them,' she says. 'I think people are thinking 'ooh, I hope they get back together'. I hope they think that. Did you think that?' I did. Several sideways shifts help make that happen. Given the opportunity, McNamara will always steer towards the edge of absurdity. The initial meet-cute between Theo and Ivy, for example, turns into a burlesque romp when, about two minutes after meeting in the kitchen of a restaurant where he is trying to escape a boring dinner, they briskly agree to have sex in the fridge. It is clear, both to them and us, that this is the start of the rest of their lives. You gasp, then laugh, at the impossible speed of these proceedings. Not so impossible, says Colman. 'I fell in love with my husband the second I saw him. Proper thunderbolts,' she says. She met Ed Sinclair when she was 20 and they were in the same play; they have been together ever since. Cumberbatch is married to Sophie Hunter, a director and playwright. 'And I did with mine, but I took 17½ years to get round to doing something about it,' he says. 'Awwww,' sighs Colman, sentimentally. Wasn't that a long wait? 'I was a tongue-tied public schoolboy, I didn't know what that was. What they were. You know. What is a woman? But I figured it out and put it to her that we could be more than friends and there we are.' One specific twist, which slants the whole relationship between the Roses, is the fact of their Englishness. Theo and Ivy live in Northern California (actually filmed in Devon, England: it was cheaper and closer to home). Their snappy banter sets them apart from American friends like Amy (Kate McKinnon) who calls herself 'an empath' without irony. 'I thought that was a brilliant stroke, for us to remain English, like fish out of water,' says Colman. 'And I'm eternally grateful, because my American accent is not that good. You haven't heard it,' she adds, turning to Cumberbatch. 'It's awful.' Barbed badinage is not an exclusively English commodity, as Cumberbatch points out. 'Think of Howard Hawks films like His Girl Friday or the films of Billy Wilder. But we do get pigeonholed that way. The invective here is very sharp and cruel, but disguised with wit. In America you get the 'roast', which is just kind of 'f--- you, you're horrible, you motherf---er'. It's unbelievable what they throw at each other. But it's the same with us; we just think we get away with it by being clever around it.' Englishness is inherently amusing; Englishness is charming. So he has found, indeed, in real life. 'You're feted for your accent and you're like 'come on, really? It's just an accent, you know.' But you can get away with speeding tickets and all sorts by just saying 'Ew, I'm so sorry, I'm English!'. Go a big Hugh Grant and they're 'oh, OK, don't do it again'. Well, you know, I say 'they'. That one cop. Better not write that. Don't try this at home, English people!' Colman is giggling. 'I do find myself going over-English when I'm there,' she admits. Underlying the Roses' verbal thrust and parry, however, is a relationship unravelling largely because nobody pays attention to it. However bizarre the battle becomes, their complacency is immediately recognisable and relatable. They think they will be fine because they always are. 'In any long relationship, you need to work on it,' says Cumberbatch. 'They are faced with huge challenges, but they bring the same fun-loving, let's-give-it-a-go attitude to this huge shift in their dynamic. 'I think this schism, not talking, losing the dialogue between you so that you're not able to find the funny and the glue and the sex and the sorries and the I-hear-you-and-understand-you, is where the separation and resentment comes in.' All that talk about having it all, he adds with feeling: that's not possible. 'You can't have it all without a cost. And the cost is that you have to keep working at it, making decisions, investing in it. So you can have it all – a career, children, a love life, a partnership that lasts – but you have to accept the cost and find a balance within that.' What The Roses is not about, as they both stress with fervour, is a home being wrecked because a wife is earning more than her husband; clearly, they both think Theo and Ivy are better than that. 'It pains me to think that people are still saying 'oh, it all goes wrong when the woman is successful'. I sort of want to punch people in the nose when I hear that,' says Colman. 'It's about the couple having pressures on them as a couple.' The two actors swap examples of how their characters let each other down, then hasten to make allowances for each other. 'He weaponises knowing more about the kids than she does,' Colman observes. 'Oh, grossly!' agrees Cumberbatch at once. Colman wondered in their Vanity Fair interview if they 'mucked about too much' on set. 'Poor Jay was probably saying 'it's like herding cats'.' On the contrary, said Roach; their energy fed the mood. 'There is a little bit of a joyful keeping the ball in the air,' he said. 'They trust each other so much that they're willing to go a little off the script or a little into dangerous territory.' Which is not so surprising from Colman, who first came into modest prominence in sketch comedy on The Peep Show, then brought her unerring comic timing to the Lanthimos films. By contrast, there aren't a lot of laughs in Cumberbatch's CV, which I now find surprising. 'That's so true!' exclaims Colman. 'How does that happen?' Cumberbatch thanks her, looking slightly abashed. It's true, he says, that he has done almost no comedy on screen, not that he's done a musical or a horror, either. He hopes all these things will come to him. 'But I've done stuff which has a lot of funny in it. Sherlock and Dr Strange are the two obvious big ones but even something like [Alan] Turing [in The Imitation Game ]: there is humour scattered through everything I do that hopefully shows I can be funny.' And he has done comedies on stage, where an audience soon tells you whether you're funny or not. 'But that can be bad,' he says, as Colman nods vigorously. 'Because if you start chasing the laugh you got last night, it goes dead. And then you're thinking 'what went wrong?'' Over to Colman. 'And then you start over-egging it.' He picks up the thread again. 'Because with that fourth wall, you know what's there. And it's quite fun not knowing – or pretending not to know, because this script is laugh-out-loud. You'd have to be really bad not to make this funny.'
