Jennifer Aniston is in bed. It’s 11am and she’s chatting to Red from underneath her duvet in her Beverly Hills home. You can’t blame her. Newly flown home from a punishing promotional tour of Europe for her latest twinkling rom-com Just Go With It (where she
unveiled a new shorter, brighter haircut), the star is understandably jet-lagged and exhausted. ‘I’m like a dead man walking,’ she says.
Only one thing for it, take to the comfiest room in the house. ‘There’s a lot of down pillows,’ she confesses. ‘I’m a pillow girl, so
I can create the closest thing to a cloud that I can.’
She’s known, still, as The Most Beautiful Everywoman In The World, Hollywood’s foremost A-list funny girl, whom most women readily relate to. Her debut fragrance, Jennifer Aniston, which she’s promoting today, was a huge success when it launched exclusively at Harrods last year and is now selling phenomenally well stateside, too. ‘I tried to collect all of the smells that I love in a bottle,’ she enthuses. ‘I kind of layer things on, whether it’s lotions or serums and oils – all the things you lather up when you get out of the bathtub and pamper yourself, all the things that make you feel really clean, sexy, sensual and refreshed. It took a while, but I think I got there and I’m very proud of the result. It’s a wonderful experience to work in a perfumery and create something unique.’
She ponders her very favourite smell of all time and alights on a surprisingly less foamy aroma. ‘I love the smell of a fire going,’ she decides. ‘Walking up to a house and you can smell the fire coming out of the chimney. That’s extraordinary. That, and the smell of cherry blossoms. Or jasmine when you’re coming home at night in the summer time.’ When, you wonder, does she think a man smells at his best? ‘At the beach,’ she smiles. ‘Just anywhere on the beach.’
For Aniston, life inspiration, and what gets her up in the morning is, ‘that I get to do what I love to do, which is entertain. It’s essential to me.’ It’s a talent that has made her one of the most influential women in Hollywood, with a personal fortune estimated by Forbes in 2007 at $110million. ‘The real core of everything is the work, and I will protect it – and myself – like a momma lion protects a cub,’ she says. ‘When I get down to business, I’m extremely focused.’
Right now, she is, she says, ‘elated, my life is in an exciting period’. She’s contemplating both a Hollywood house move and seeking ‘an apartment in New York’, has two imminent movies, Horrible Bosses and Wanderlust, while shifting work priorities to her production company, Echo Films, ‘working more behind the scenes, which I’ve been itching to do’. She welcomes the uncertainty. ‘There’s an unknown quality to it all which I love,’ she notes. ‘And you have to consciously create the space for change, otherwise you’re just a hamster on a wheel and you’re just going to keep doing what you do and there becomes a sort of stagnation. You have to reignite the creative.’ It’s a drive that Aniston’s had since the early days of her career.
Born in California and mostly raised in New York, she supplemented an initially struggling acting career (post-Manhattan drama school, she appeared in a string of cancelled TV shows) with jobs as a telemarketer, bike messenger and waitress. Those years are long gone. Today, she’s made over 25 movies that, while often critically dismissed, are adored by global audiences. Who else can claim to have generated an astonishing $1.7 billion at the worldwide box office? How does the woman herself explain her universal appeal, accessibility aside? ‘You know what? I think people just want to laugh,’ she decides. ‘There’s so much going on in the world right now weighing heavy on everybody’s minds and hearts, that you want to just get out there and disappear and be silly and have a laugh. At other people just being silly.’ She’s more than happy with her role as the bringer of that lightness. ‘I’ll sign up for that!’ she laughs. ‘I’ll bring you your order of light, coming up. Well, I’ll do my best. I always just do my best.’
Since Friends began its incandescently successful 10-year run back in 1994, Aniston has been our best-loved comic actress, whose bewitching talents she ascribes to ‘a real love of detail’. She’s also admirably gifted at the fame-game, dealing with the daily intrusions, and her seemingly permanent position on the cover of the National Enquirer, with enormous grace and dignity. Tell her so, and she’s taken aback. ‘Oh,’ she says, startled. ‘Thank you, that means a lot to me. I try. Fame is an odd beast. Because it’s not real. There’s nothing real about it. Sometimes, you wake up and think, “I don’t know if I’m as big as this beast. Will today be the day when it gets me?” Because you’re only one person like everybody else, with veins and a heart, and yet you’re projected as almost superhuman. There’s certain things that come with that – cameras in your face, lies, rumours, the part of you that wants to give and the part you have to keep desperately to yourself. Because there’s so much that’s picked at or taken or wanted.’
At 42, Aniston is ‘extremely relaxed’ about her single status. Attempting to meet a partner in paparazzi-peppered Hollywood is, she says, ‘ridiculous’, but she negotiates the landscape as normally as she can. ‘You have to normalise it!’ she hoots. ‘You would die otherwise. But no, I’m not a big fan of dating. I have dinner with male friends and it’s instantly, “that’s the new man”. The phone is ringing off the hook from your publicist saying, “Did you have dinner with so and so?” and it’s “yes, I did and no, I’m not”. So you sort of just meet people.’
The spotlight permanently trained on Aniston’s singleness, however, has been eclipsed recently by speculation on her wish for a child. It’s something that she said last year is eventually ‘going to happen’ and implored the world to ‘relax’. In 2010, while promoting the hilarious sperm-mix-up caper movie The Switch, she publicly supported the concept of single motherhood via sperm-donor, thrilled that science now provides ‘so many options’ for singles and couples.
I suggest to Aniston that there are two people who endure this pressure for marriage/kids more than anyone else in showbiz: herself and George Clooney. So perhaps she and George should run off together, get married, have three kids in rapid succession and then the world would finally shut up. Aniston laughs uproariously. ‘That would definitely shut up the world!’ she guffaws. ‘I could call up George, say, “Hon, let’s just get hitched and have kids...” I should take George to lunch and we can figure out how to put an end to all this... Ha! Well... No.’
Joking apart, Aniston still believes she will one day find what she calls ‘the love of her life’, something she discussed last year while interviewing Nicole Kidman for an American magazine (‘Man,’ she tells me, ‘your job is hard’). Kidman revealed that her favourite dinner-party question is, ‘Would you rather have a great love that lasts a lifetime or an amazing career where you go down in history?’ ‘That’s a no-brainer,’ said Aniston at the time, ‘I would choose the love of my life.’ Sometimes, though, as Aniston knows only too well, things change. People change. ‘The truth is, you can’t just have the love, either,’ she says today. ‘You have to have a balance in life. You also have to have your own personal love: what inspires you, what excites you when you wake up in the morning.’
True love aside, Aniston is extraordinarily friendly. ‘Where is that accent from?’ she asks me (unreconstructed east coast Scotland), ‘it’s beautiful. I can literally hear the rolling hills.’ But there’s steel below the surface, just ask gossip blogger Perez Hilton. Spotting him in a car park recently, Aniston wound down her window and asked him, ‘Why are you so mean?’ (Reportedly, he hasn’t been quite so mean since.)
Two years into her forties, Jennifer Aniston the fragrance is just another chapter in her career portfolio, but the decade so far, she says, has brought her a new calm. ‘There’s a certain amount of “sit back and enjoy everything” now,’ she says, of domestic bliss with her two dogs, Norman and Dolly. Ageing naturally is, she says, ‘beautiful’ (she used Botox once and hated its ‘hard’ effect), and credits her flawless skin to state-of-the-art serums and a Californian ‘facialist’. Working out ‘every other day’, keeps her in enviable shape, as does a personal yoga instructor. And while she eats primarily ‘really well’, it’s refreshing to hear that Aniston refuses to deny herself wine, coffee, dairy or her beloved margarita-and-nachos nights-out with girlfriends, ‘because then I would be devastated!’
She is godmother to her best friend Courteney Cox’s six-year-old daughter Coco and supports myriad philanthropic organisations and charities, from children’s hospitals to freeing Burma to gay-rights issues – a true romantic, certainly, but ultimately a realist who has always known, even if you sleep on a fluffy cloud, the storms are never all that far away. For Aniston, her lasting friendships remain the foundations of her life.
‘Where would you be without friends?’ she concludes, without a hint of comic intention. ‘Where would you be without people to pick you up when you need lifting? As we know, myself and a lot of my friends, we’ve come from homes that were far from perfect, so you end up almost parent and sibling to your friends, and vice versa. Your own chosen family. There’s nothing like a really loyal, dependable, good friend. Nothing.’
The debut fragrance by Jennifer Aniston is available at The Perfume Shop and Boots. £29 for 50ml EDP
Jennifer’s Best things in life
Best book: ‘The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. A brain science book that I loved.’
Best film: ‘Terms Of Endearment.’
Best stress-release: ‘Laughter.’
Best TV show: ‘Friends. I’m teasing! Seinfeld.’
Best designer: ‘That’s impossible! I love so many.’
Best way to spend a weekend: ‘With your nearest and dearest. You know me, I always love a little beach getaway. I’m a creature of habit and I just love the sound of the ocean. A place where you can go and throw it all away.’
Best friend: ‘So many. I couldn’t do that! I’ll say “me”.’
Best thing in life: ‘Like I said, your friends. Your real friends. And boy, it hurts us so much when we find out otherwise.’
