The reasons why Jennifer Aniston is one of the most beloved in Hollywood
The series The Morning Show once again brought to the fore who she was one of the top stars of the sitcom Friends.
In an episode of the series The Morning Show, Jennifer Aniston's character meets with a publicist to plan the announcement of her divorce. "If your husband cheats on you with another he will play in your favor because you are going to give pity, but mixed with compassion," the expert explains.
The camera does not abandon Aniston for a second, who listens to these advice, going from perplexity, to bitterness and resignation. The actress is aware that all viewers will remember her scandalous divorce from Brad Pitt, now 15 years ago, when America's girlfriend became America's cheated on without her being able to do anything about it. Or so it made it seem. Jennifer Aniston has been in control of the media for 25 years, since she stormed the pilot episode of Friends, dressed as a bride, to make it appear that the media is controlling her.
Rachel was the most human character on Friends: indecisive, irritable, and always in need of help from others. A 25-year-old girl, a friend of her friends and a colleague of her boyfriends, who benefited from the talent that Aniston had to react during the seconds of canned laughter, in which many actors do not know how to appear natural, taking advantage of them to be lovely. At the beginning of the third season, Rolling Stone took her naked on the cover of it with the headline "The Girl Friend" (pun between "the girlfriend" and "the friend"). And then Brad came along.
All women were in love with Brad Pitt. All men were in love with Jennifer Aniston. They met at a date orchestrated by their representatives and more than a million dollars were spent on the wedding: 50,000 flowers, a gospel choir, 13 minutes of fireworks flying over the Pacific Ocean to music by Radiohead, Garbage and Jeff Buckley. At her wedding vows, Aniston promised Pitt that she would always be ready to make him his favorite banana shake. As he tossed the bouquet, she collided with a lantern and fell back into his hands like a premonition in a romantic comedy. Her boyfriends laughed nervously when she made the wrong vows and exclaimed, “Oh! It is that I never did ”. Typical of Rachel.
In 2002, Aniston won the Emmy for the eighth season of Friends, she claimed that she too wanted to be a young mother and seemed destined to evolve into a movie star. And then Angelina arrived. The two agreed only once. It was just before the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, so Aniston rolled down her car window and greeted her: "Brad is very excited to work with you, I hope you have a great time." Be careful what you wish for. On January 1, 2005, Pitt and Aniston were walking hand in hand while on vacation in Anguilla with Courteney Cox. Six days later they announced their divorce. On April 23, Pitt and Jolie were photographed playing with her son on a Kenyan beach.
If Jennifer Aniston's life were a soap opera, Angelina Jolie would be exactly the kind of woman the screenwriters would invent to steal her husband: dark, sexual, dangerous. If Aniston was a princess, Jolie was a witch. If Aniston was the girl next door with the skin of a newcomer on vacation, Jolie had the features of a pale-skinned Amazon. If Jennifer wore jeans, tank tops, and rings on her toes, Angelina wore leather, tattoos, and a tube with her second husband's blood hanging around her neck.
Jennifer Aniston was portrayed by the media as a maiden, while Angelina Jolie gave Brad Pitt six children in two years almost by magic: three adopted and three biological. In 2005, T-shirts with the slogan Team Aniston ("Team Aniston") sold 25 times more than those of Team Jolie ("Team Jolie"). Anyone could relate to the fear that your partner will run off with a co-worker. Once again, anyone could identify with Jennifer Aniston.
She insists that she refuses to position herself as a victim, but she also does not completely flee from that role that, after all, her beloved audience wants her to play. In her first interview as her divorcee, for Vanity Fair in October 2006, she burst into tears as soon as she opened the door for the journalist. She still did not understand what had happened, but she defended her ex-husband by explaining that she believed him if he said he was not unfaithful, he admitted to having succumbed to the temptation to read a tabloid magazine (in which Kimberly, Rod Stewart's daughter, called him "maruja") who ruined his day and confessed that he used to walk to the rocks of a nearby beach to scream at the sea. But Aniston meekly clung to her title of Bride of America: “I still believe in love. Right now there is an amazing man out there who is the father of my children. In five years I hope to be married with a baby ”.
The dozens of interviews the actress has since given served as installments of her hero's journey: triumph, betrayal, and resurgence. On the one hand, they are like a saga where the public can follow the status of her relationship with Pitt as well as her beauty secrets or her sentimental misadventures. On the other hand, each interview is an opportunity to revalidate her public image. All the reports have points in common. The interview takes place at her home in hers Bel Air, where she herself awaits the arrival of the journalist on the porch to give him a tour that culminates in the views, which go as far as Santa Monica. The house is always in the process of renovation or redecoration. The topics to be discussed are her childhood, her family, her partners and her hobbies. Never her career. At some point one of her dogs interrupts.
Aniston often tells a recent anecdote about the paparazzi besieging the mansion. When asked about Jolie, she always asks the interviewer to turn off the recorder to answer honestly. It is as if the journalist felt the need to, on behalf of her readers, comfort Jennifer while they ate ice cream. And the actress knows that her success comes from the same place as her condemnation: the public adores her and does not tire of her. When Jennifer Aniston poses for a magazine, her eyes seem to look at the reader as if she is an old friend of hers.
That is why the public loves to see her find her love in the movies, but at the same time she wishes that she does not find it in real life: if Jennifer Aniston reached her happy ending, her soap opera would end. The actress stars again and again in the same romantic comedy and she never changes her hairstyle, her wardrobe (she still wears wide brown belts) or her speech. Meanwhile, her soap opera changes her co-star (Vince Vaughn, John Meyer, Justin Theroux) and with each breakup of her the headlines of "spinster", "unhappy" or "redo her life" return. The same week that she announced her divorce from Theroux, Architectural Digest magazine featured them on the cover showing the house they had bought and renovated together. Thing of karma, according to various magazines, because Aniston "had made an Angelina" to Theroux's ex-girlfriend, with whom she had been 14 years, during the filming of Take me out of paradise.
Aniston molds her image as a marketing operation: she publishes photos of her Thanksgiving dinner with her ex Justin Theroux and her friend Courteney Cox, assures that although her engagement rings were two huge diamonds, she prefers Indian jewelry and believes that the great The love of his life, an actor he left just before Friends and died of a tumor in 2007, sent Theroux down from heaven. She exhibits her private life while asking that no one get into her. And she does not consider stopping talking about Pitt or Jolie: that first interview between tears was human, close and understandable.
Another crusade of Aniston is to denounce that society projects on her her anxieties about femininity: since they cannot scrutinize her body, which never seems to gain or lose even a kilo, they are obsessed with whether there is a fetus inside. he. In June 2016 In Touch pulled out her bikini tummy with the headline "Jen is finally pregnant!" and the same magazine announced her pregnancy again, and none other than Brad Pitt, in July 2018, in October of the same year and in January 2019. “Nobody knows what happened medically or emotionally. There is pressure for women to be mothers, and if they are not, they are seen as defective merchandise. Maybe my purpose on this planet is not to procreate ”, she explained last year to In Style. However, would this fake news have an impact if Aniston herself did not mention it in every interview?
Aniston may fear that the public will stop loving her and so she continues to foster the fantasy that she needs, like Rachel, others to protect her. She has been among the ten highest paid actresses in the world for 19 consecutive years, was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Actors Guild Award for The Morning Show, her comedy Murder Mystery was the most watched in Netflix history during its first three days and When Instagram was launched, it broke the record of the Dukes of Sussex by reaching a million followers in 5 hours and 16 minutes. Her continuing to resort to her image as divorced from her from her village is like when Rachel wore her high school cheerleader outfit because she had never failed her to flirt.
Jennifer Aniston debuted on Instagram with a photo that brought together the six protagonists of Friends, because she knows how to give the public what she wants and, most importantly, always leave them wanting more. A recent market study concluded that Aniston is the third best-liked woman by consumers, behind only Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton. As she explains her character on The Morning Show of her when they try to fire her from her: “America loves me. And that means I am the owner of America. I'm sick of not being valued ”. Rachel would never say something like that, Jennifer probably would. But never during an interview.
