Jennifer Aniston enjoyed ten seasons as Rachel Green on Friends. After the series ended,
she launched a successful movie career, becoming one of the most famous people on the planet.
But there's still plenty to learn about the beloved actress. Here are some things you
may not know about Jennifer Aniston.
One unexpected byproduct of Friends' success was the popularity of the hairstyle worn by
Aniston's character, a 'do that came to be known as "the Rachel." The look was created
by stylist Chris McMillan, who told The Telegraph that he advised Aniston to grow, highlight,
and experiment with her hair when he first met her. He chopped off some length and added
layers, ultimately creating one of the most iconic haircuts of the time.
But Aniston was not as enamored with her hair as the rest of the world was. She told Allure
in 2011,
"I love Chris, and he's the bane of my existence at the same time because he started that damn
Rachel, which was not my best look...It was the ugliest haircut I've ever seen."
It was also difficult to maintain. Calling the hairstyle "cringe-y," Aniston told Glamour
that she couldn't do it on her own without McMillan working his magic. She quipped,
"Left to my own devices, I am not skilled with a hairbrush and blow-dryer."
Aniston's first media appearance was on The Howard Stern Show in 1989, not to promote
an acting role, but to sell weight-loss products. At the time, she was working for NutriSystem,
which promoted her as a "success story" after she shed 15 pounds following the company's
diet plan. NutriSystem was one of the radio show's sponsors.
According to a transcript from her visit to the show reported by Us Weekly, host Howard
Stern told the not-yet-famous Aniston she was "very lovely" and praised her, quote,
"very sensual pout [and ] full [chest]." She held her own, deftly sidestepping questions
about when she'd lost her virginity and politely declining his suggestion that she pose for
Playboy.
Thirty years later, Aniston returned to the show as Stern's pal, having vacationed with
him and other friends in early 2014. In the interview, she shared her recollection of
that earlier appearance. All she could really remember was what she was wearing that day:
white Reebok high-top sneakers, a tank top, and khaki shorts.
"And as I walked in I just remember hearing jungle cries.
"Jungle cries?"
"I guess it had a safari vibe to what I was wearing."
Aniston's parents are both actors. Her father, John Aniston, is best known for portraying
Victor on NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives, a role he first started playing in 1985. In
an interview with Collider, Aniston recalled being a child and seeing her dad on the TV
sitcom That Girl. She explained,
"[I was] overwhelmed that my father was in the television set because I wasn't quite
sure what he did, at that point."
When Aniston decided she wanted to pursue a career as an actor, she admitted she was
determined even though her father pleaded with her to do something else with her life.
She recalled,
"He said, 'I do not want your heart broken. The rejection is brutal. Please, please, please
don't do that. Become a lawyer."
Aniston ignored that advice, admitting that was her, quote, "one rebellion" against her
parents. She added,
"I just had this deep feeling in my gut that somehow something was going to happen, and
I just had to be patient."
Making it in showbiz takes some serious tenacity and a very thick skin, and Aniston's success
didn't happen overnight. Like many struggling wannabe actors, she worked at an assortment
of different jobs to support herself while she hit audition after audition in search
of the big role that would launch her career and set her on the road to stardom. She told
Collider,
"I worked at an advertising agency, as a receptionist."
She revealed that she also worked as a bicycle messenger in New York City, a job that lasted
all of two days. Though she was great at flying down the street, she apparently wasn't the
best at finding her way to drop-off locations, as she told The Mirror in an interview, jokingly
apologizing for, quote, "all those envelopes and packages that arrived late."
While Aniston said she enjoyed her brief time riding around on her bike, she didn't care
much for one of her other jobs. Waitressing, she insisted, was her least favorite of all
the various jobs she had before becoming famous, confessing that waiting tables was, in her
words, "the worst job [she] ever had."
When producers of NBC's Friends cast Aniston, they knew they had found their Rachel. But
there was one not-so-small problem, according to the book Generation Friends.
Prior to landing her Friends role, Aniston had shot a few episodes of a CBS sitcom called
Muddling Through that never made it onto the schedule. When CBS decided to burn off those
unaired episodes on Saturday nights, this presented the possibility Muddling Through
could draw enough viewers to entice CBS to produce more. Since Aniston was in first position
for that show, if Muddling Through was picked up, Friends would need to recast her role
and reshoot the pilot for a show NBC felt had "hit" written all over it.
Unwilling to take a risk, then-NBC president Warren Littlefield issued a two-word order,
saying,
"Kill it."
And an exec hatched a plan. Unaired TV movies based on popular Danielle Steel novels, which
would have drawn far bigger ratings on another night, were aired on Saturdays opposite Muddling
Through. This sacrificial-lamb strategy worked, the Danielle Steel movies did the trick, crushing
Muddling Through in the ratings. Aniston's problematic show vanished, freeing her up
for Friends.
Besides Muddling Through, another potential job threatened to stand in the way of Aniston
and her destiny on Friends. Around the same time that she landed the role of Rachel, she
received an offer to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.
Aniston and SNL alum Adam Sandler sat down for an interview with Oprah Winfrey, and,
in it, Sandler recalled seeing Aniston in the SNL offices back in the day.
"I was like, 'Oh, my God. There's Aniston. Is she about to be on our show?'"
According to Aniston, she told Sandler at the time that SNL creator Lorne Michaels wanted
her on the show, but she turned him down.
"She's gonna do that Friends? What the hell is Friends?"
Speaking about her decision to walk away from SNL, Aniston later told Howard Stern that
she didn't think she would've liked the "environment" of that show. Admitting she had "no memory"
of how she wound up meeting with Michaels, Aniston did recall thinking it was a, quote,
"boy's club," and she talked to Michaels about her expectations of how women should be treated
if she joined the cast. She ended up choosing Friends… and the rest is history.
"But they thought I was making a huge mistake…"
"Worked out for ya…"
"Did alright…"
"People like that one."
For Aniston, a day at the beach is, well, no day at the beach. That's because she has
had a lifelong fear of water, stemming from a traumatic childhood accident she's never
been able to overcome. In 2015, she told E! News,
"I basically have a real fear of going underwater."
She said it all went back to when she was a child riding a tricycle near a pool and
rode it into the water. She recalled,
"I didn't let go and my brother tried to [help me]."
This complicated her role in 2015's Cake, in which she played a woman who develops an
addiction to prescription painkillers after surviving a serious accident, since the character
undergoes water therapy. She admitted,
"So, I can't go underwater and no one will believe me. I honestly can't."
She further detailed her phobia in a red carpet interview with ET Canada. Aniston revealed
she was terrified of falling into water.
"I have a lot of reasons, these are rational fears."
Dyslexia is an affliction that has affected many celebrities, with ABC News reporting
that the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Cher have all opened up about their own
respective struggles with dyslexia. Aniston has also gone public about her dyslexia, revealing
in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that she didn't even know she had it until
she was diagnosed in her early 20s.
As Aniston recalled, receiving the diagnosis was "life-changing", because, until discovering
she was dyslexic, she simply believed that she, in her words, "wasn't smart." As she
told The Hollywood Reporter, all her life she had problems with retaining information.
When she was finally diagnosed, however, the revelation led her to finally come to understand
the underlying cause of issues she'd been experiencing throughout her entire life but
had never been able to piece together. She explained,
"Now I had this great discovery. I felt like all of my childhood trauma-dies, tragedies,
dramas were explained."
Before Friends, Aniston landed a starring role in a 1993 horror film that looked at
the scarier side of St. Patrick's Day: Leprechaun, a low-budget slasher film about a homicidal
leprechaun who gleefully slaughters anyone standing between him and his missing pot of
gold.
Appearing on Howard Stern's radio show in 2019, Aniston recalled feeling like she had
"arrived" when she starred in the critically panned movie. However, she told Stern she
was proud to have appeared in the "cult classic," admitting,
"I really did think it was an amazing thing that I was in a movie."
In fact, she also revealed that she and her now former husband Justin Theroux had watched
Leprechaun together while they were dating, but not by her choice. According to Aniston,
the pair were channel-surfing when Theroux came across the film and insisted on watching.
She explained,
"It was one of those things when I tried to get that remote out of his hand and there
was just no having it. He was like, 'No, no, no, no, this is happening.' I just kept walking
in and out, cringing."
Everyone knows that Aniston was married to Brad Pitt. After their split, she later wed
Theroux, with the couple mutually ending their relationship a few years later. But in between
those unions, Aniston dated musician John Mayer.
Aniston and Mayer, as Marie Claire reported, met at a 2008 Oscars party and dated for about
a year, reportedly breaking up and getting back together a few times. As The Telegraph
reported in 2009, the straw that finally broke the camel's back for Aniston was when Mayer
told her he was too busy to return her messages while she watched his Twitter updates in real
time. A source told The Telegraph,
"Jen was fuming...He'd update with some stupid line...She was like, 'He has time for all
this Twittering, but he can't send me a text, an email, make a call?'"
Finally, Aniston had enough. The source claimed that when she broke it off,
"[Mayer] just said OK, and that he was sorry it didn't work out. He took the break-up like
a man."
After Friends ended its run in 2004, Aniston left TV for a successful film career. In 2019,
she returned to television to co-star with Reese Witherspoon in The Morning Show, a comedy-drama
with themes of female empowerment in the Me Too era, set at a network morning show. This
time, Aniston wasn't just acting, she was also executive producing. According to The
Hollywood Reporter, both Aniston and Witherspoon were each paid $2 million per episode, with
their salaries, quote, "said to be even higher with producing fees and ownership points."
A truckload of cash wasn't the only reason behind Aniston's return to television for
the first time in 15 years. She told Reuters,
"It wasn't really about TV versus film. It was really the show...It was the most rewarding
thing I've done in years."
In the series, Aniston played a veteran TV host who finds herself on suddenly shaky ground
when her longtime co-host is fired over allegations of misconduct. While her character experiences
ageism from the network brass, Aniston admitted that wasn't something she'd experienced in
real life. She explained,
"I haven't necessarily felt that ageism has affected me, only because I feel like I'm
working more than I've ever worked."
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