A Good Girl

She's got the chops, she's got the hair, she's got the hot husband. What's next for Along Came Polly's Jennifer Aniston? Anything she wants.

By Fred Schruers
Photographed by Mark Abrahams

"We've got her hidden," says the elegant brunet who greets patrons of the secluded patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A hotel security man of goodly dimensions nods pleasantly as we head back to where the curve of the wall leads us to a table shielded by a semicircular grotto. There sits Jennifer Aniston. She is intent in conversation with another woman, but looks up and makes an amiable gesture to reel us in.

Aniston, 34, was recently listed by Forbes as as America抯 ultimate celebrity based on her visibility and on her sheer avalanche of income. Between her soon-to-be-concluded series Friends and a busy spate of moonlighting in feature films, she earned some $35 million in 2002. We抣l soon learn that her companion is Kristin Hahn, a writer-filmmaker (Anthem) and a key executrix of Aniston and husband Brad Pitt抯 company Plan B. Yet these two fledgling moguls give off an air of happy innocence. Sitting under a striped awning, pert, stylish, and wide-eyed, they resemble a couple of kids waiting for an aunt to arrive with ice cream.

They manage to keep their upbeat mien even as the interviewer drops his tape recorder on the table with a thunk, and introductions are made, establishing that their friendship of 15 years reaches back to what Aniston has termed her Laurel Canyon gang. Aniston抯 quite happy to discuss Along Came Polly, in which she plays the title role of a flighty Manhattanite opposite Ben Stiller as the neurotic risk analyst who抯 fallen for her, but for a few more moments they抮e squarely planted in Plan B mode.

“So how this all happened,” explains Aniston, “we basically said, ‘Let’s start to make a movie,’ and started with one little baby step, right? What’s the saying about the longest journey starts with one . . . ?”

Kristin: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions?”

Jennifer: “The road to—no, that’s a different one. No, the big—what is it?—Oh, it’s what Mariane says in the beginning of her book. . . .”

For a moment, it’s as if the patio has been cast into shadow. Aniston is referring to Mariane Pearl’s memoir A Mighty Heart, which tells of losing her journalist husband Daniel to terrorist kidnappers. Spurred by the couple’s, and Hahn’s, early interest, Plan B (and Warner Bros., which bankrolled the deal) acquired the book over stiff competition.

Aniston finishes the phrase: “ ‘. . . starts with one step.’ So—Brad and I did this under the radar for a while, and we called ourselves Bloc—the dictionary definition was a group of people coming together, uniting under a common cause.”

Kristin: “Jen played the word in Scrabble, and we thought, oh, that’s good. We started calling ourselves Blocheads.”

Jennifer: “Yeah, Blocheads, Bloc Productions. Bloc Products. Bloc Party. It’s sort of snowballed into this wonderful creative place for us all to be working, and we’re having a blast. In fact, we’ve got 17 movies in development."

Hahn is perched on a forearm and ready to depart, but reparks in her seat as Aniston makes a pointed observation: “We started this little company underground, didn’t really talk about it ’cause we didn’t want to be accused of being actors who have vanity deals where you don’t do anything. We wanted to do something first. And then about a year later, Brad Grey approached us. Then it sort of grew into this huge machine in corporate Warner America world.”

“Brad and Jen and Brad provide a sort of gravitational pull that allows us to really be attracted to material that isn’t, quote unquote, studio, middle-of-the-road material,” says Hahn. Instead, “there’s something that’s either cerebral or unfamiliar or original—we’re not a straight genre movie kind of company.”

From a pet Pitt project, the Eric Roth–scripted retelling of the infamous Hatfield and McCoy feud, through a pet Aniston piece, Zora, about the testing of a superwoman’s mettle, as originally presented by Ira Glass on public radio’s This American Life, Plan B has indeed sought the quirkier properties. Not the least of these is the first one set to shoot, a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp.

The earliest project Hahn and Aniston dreamed up, years ago (though never embarked on), was a memoir of sorts. “Yeah,” says Aniston, “As the Hill Turns. All the dramas that go on, and the incestuous relationships that went on, amongst our friends. It was like—Friends.”

“A whole amalgamation,” says Hahn, “of people just helping each other stay sane.”

“And some of us succeeded at that,” adds Aniston. “Others went crazy.”

And those would be . . .

“We don’t,” says Aniston, “name names of the crazy people.”

When Brad Grey turned up on the set of Along Came Polly last winter, he was bringing words of encouragement to his esteemed female partner; Aniston had broken her toe on an ottoman while rushing for the phone at home (as America saw when she hobbled into the People’s Choice Awards in an air cast, leaning on a cane). “She and Ben Stiller are on a boat,” recalls Grey, who saw Aniston standing with her wounded, wrapped foot just below the camera’s view, “and they were basically flipping the thing around. I was nauseous just watching it.”

The scene takes place near the midpoint of the story, which was written by John Hamburg much in the vein of earlier scripts he’d worked on: 2000’s Meet the Parents and 2001’s Zoolander, both starring Stiller. The latter film was only modestly successful, and last year’s Stiller entry Duplex stalled at less than $10 million at the box office, but this time Hamburg would direct his own screenplay. Hamburg, whose directorial debut was the darkly funny Safe Men, immediately knew his Polly costars had comic chemistry: “This movie flip-flops between the two of them reacting to each other. . . . When you work with Ben, you need to keep up with him. Not many people can, and she managed to, perfectly. And he managed to keep up with her.”

Stiller’s obsessive-compulsive Reuben and Aniston’s title character, an author of such volumes as The Boy With a Nub for an Arm, are old schoolmates who meet up as adults. “Ben’s character plans his entire life out the way that a lot of us do,” says Hamburg. “We say, ‘At this age I want this, I want to be married, I want to have kids at this age.’ The rug gets pulled out from under him [wife Debra Messing cheats on him with a St. Bart’s scuba instructor played by Hank Azaria], and Polly comes into his life. She’s a big force of change in his life, and [the role] needed a really strong actress.”

Universal copresident of production Mary Parent, who oversaw Polly, recalls the furor caused by Aniston’s doing a scene with Stiller in midtown Manhattan—a noisy pack of paparazzi was shouting to the actors even as they played an important early moment—“because, you know, they want to see her. She’s a bona fide movie star. I’ll never forget, I walked into my office one day, there were a bunch of assistants looking out the window. I said, ‘What’s so exciting in my office?’And they said, ‘Jennifer Aniston is down there.’ You know, there are big movie stars on our lot every day—but I don’t have a crowd of assistants in my office every day looking out the window.

“She’s got it all, the talent and the range. She’s got comic timing like nobody’s business. She’s extraordinarily beautiful, but at the same time I think she’s just as appealing to women as she is to men, and—how do I say this?—women don’t punish her for the fact that men think she’s hot.

“Her character in The Good Girl was the antithesis of all that [allure]. And it wasn’t like you had to take a minute to see her that way. She just was that character. I think that it says a lot about her ability as an actress to transcend an iconic part like Rachel. I think she’s going to traverse the independent and the major studio worlds effortlessly.”

Aniston finds Polly “a little flaky. She wouldn’t think so, but that’s sort of the charm—that she just doesn’t see anything wrong with how she acts. And to him it’s just like nails on a chalkboard. And yet they can’t help but fall for each other. I find her just very fearful of intimacy, fearful of letting herself be vulnerable, but I see her as very fearless, actually, in the way she sort of jumps all over the place. She can be anywhere, goes into all sorts of situations.”

For Polly producer Stacey Sher, gutsiness is a trait Polly shares with the woman who plays her. “She sort of has all of her technique in her back pocket, and so what you get is a person who is fearless in their performance. Combine that with her extraordinary comedic timing . . . It’s really fun to watch her and Ben together. She always wanted to make sure that she never fell into Rachel, because she was working two jobs, and she was vigilant about it and in making sure that John never let her get away with it.”

At one point in November 2002, Aniston was working three jobs—the next-to-last season of Friends, the last shooting days of Bruce Almighty, and Polly. “We just figured out all the permutations and made it work,” says Sher, “and she never let on if she was tired, never complained, and she was always so prepared that there was never a bleed-over of any character into any of the others.”

Hamburg, Sher, and Parent are united in their admiration of Aniston’s ability to shrug off that painfully broken toe and shoot first an exterior shot on a boat riding the chop between Los Angeles and Catalina Island, then an interior on the contraption—built to stand in for the belowdecks cabin on the yacht—in which she and Stiller ride out a cinematic storm at sea. “She valiantly embarked on this yacht,” says cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Hours), “and we shot it to avoid seeing her heavily bandaged foot. I don’t know how she managed not to show the pain on her face then, nor when we shot a few days later and she was literally thrown from one side of the ship’s cabin to the other on this very, very painful toe. There was no sense of her being a martyr, she wasn’t expecting sympathy—she just did her job brilliantly with great humor and professionalism.

“The crew adored her. My wife and I often recall something she said when it was time for the [tricky to plan] wrap party—she said, ‘We’ll find the fun.’ ”

“I was pretty much a zombie throughout that whole shoot if I remember correctly,” says Aniston, who has the knack of dismantling compliments as she receives them. “Doing three things was a little bit ambitious and I don’t think I need to do that again.”

With Friends ending its ten-year run, Aniston should be able to concentrate on films. Though some of her fellow Friends have taken a thrashing for their excursions into film, she’s transcended everything from Leprechaun (“Oh, we never discussed that? That’s because we don’t”) to a second-fiddle role in Bruce Almighty (“That was a Jim Carrey movie,” she says equably). For Sher, there’s no question of whether Aniston has punched her way out of the television box: “I think that there’s no stigma anymore in any media crossover. It started happening before this—if Helen Hunt came from a television series, Mad About You, to winning a best-actress award, and you had before that Woody Harrelson crossing over, Will Smith crossing over from music, then to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and then to being one of the biggest movie stars working today—it’s really specific to the actor.”

“It’s not [only] that she got on some hot show that made this huge cultural impact and she’s cute and funny,” says Parent. “It’s so much deeper than that. And she’s a real actor. You can go look at any of those movies, and it’s right there. You never tire of her. And again, she mixes it up. You don’t think, oh, gosh, I only want to see her like this.”

Aniston discusses the warm critical reception she earned in The Good Girl with the refreshing pragmatism her years in the business have given her: “I think it allowed me a little more time. It’s like I said, I just want to be around for a while. I just don’t want to fade away and wash up—because I didn’t take chances, you know. I wanted to know. I was getting very comfortable in my comedy mode, and I wanted to scare myself a little bit. And that was good because I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I thought I would be a laughingstock. And one of my greatest fears is being laughed at.”

If Aniston has many film execs and others in Hollywood high places touting her acting chops and her future, the comments about her more personal virtues add up to almost a din of steady praise. The extreme solicitude she shows in social or work settings seems to be generated from her own vulnerabilities. The rift that opened between her and her mother after Nancy Aniston discussed her in a TV interview and, later, in a memoir has seemed to abate in recent years, and periods of estrangement from her dad, John—for more than two decades a soap opera star (most notably as the somewhat villainous Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives)—are in the past.

Her parents divorced when she was nine, but Jennifer spent parts of her fifth and sixth years in the area of Crete where her dad, born Anastassakis, is from. “My dad decided he wasn’t making it as an actor, so he went to go to medical school in Greece. We moved there, and stayed almost a year.’’

She remembers their apartment building in Athens and later living in Crete on “a beautiful old farm with goats running around. And I remember going to a lot of ruins and loving just getting lost, going into all these little, like, nooks and openings that no one could fit in, but I could.”

When her dad was cast in a soap opera in New York, they returned. John Aniston, perhaps not so surprisingly, discouraged his daughter’s interest in acting. “He never let me go to the set—I remember [visiting] maybe once or twice. I wasn’t allowed to watch television until I was a teenager. I remember when I wanted to go to Performing Arts, the high school, and he just said, ‘Don’t. Don’t do it, don’t do it. Be a doctor, be a lawyer.’ ”

Aniston’s features are still but her eyes are more shielded than usual: “I feel like I didn’t have any choice. I don’t—didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself to do anything else but pretend. And act. And entertain.

“I like making people happy. It kind of works being a people-pleaser; it’s the ultimate job, to get to work doing things that allow people to escape for a half hour or two hours or whatever and be entertained. It’s so necessary, too, to have those moments, especially right now—this is a weird time. “

A short while after this meeting, Aniston will reach a $550,000 settlement with an entrepreneur who allegedly sold photos of her sunbathing topless in her own backyard (earlier, she reached undisclosed settlements with two magazines that published them). And although she’s only intermittently political, there’s one piece of legislation she’d like to see passed—an anti-paparazzi bill. “I don’t expect people to have sympathy for me. It’s not even what I’m asking for. I’m just thinking, how can we . . . do something about it? ’Cause there’s no protection; you don’t know how crazy these people are.”

She grows a bit flinty recalling those days when she and Stiller were driven nuts by mobbing photographers—“Like weird vultures, just the bottom of the food chain.” Almost worse, the Beverly Hills mansion she and Pitt moved into in July is a regular stop for gawkers, who stand in the street outside their property. “It’s embarrassing, wondering what our neighbors are thinking. It’s a wall, it’s a gate, what are you people looking at? Why are you ringing my doorbell all day long? And they put you in this star map thing, and these tour buses go around every hour. Then there’s walking tours now that are like 20 people. It’s like they’re at a zoo.”

And yet life in the zoo—she and Pitt were married on July 29, 2000, in what she calls a “pretty normal, straight-arrow, beautiful ceremony”—is clearly sweet. As Pitt worked on the historical epic Troy, Aniston got away to visit him on Malta and in Cabo San Lucas. (The couple loves Mexico; Aniston says the best use she’s found for what she seems to regard as a nervous-making oversupply of money is flying friends down to Mexico and sharing a large villa for a few days.)

They found their house—a six-bedroom, $14 million Normandy-style gem built by architect Wallace Neff in 1934 for two-time Oscar winner Fredric March—only after an 18-month search. “It was the last house we looked at. We were tired. We hadn’t gone to look at it sooner because we wanted a city view. But it had a forest view; it looks out onto these trees. It’s gorgeous. It wasn’t even a question. We just walked in; it was a feeling. It had nothing to do with the location—I wouldn’t think my first choice would be Beverly Hills. Amazing.

“There’s actually just a door that sold me, a little princess door from the kitchen onto the backyard, and it has old blue glass in circular panes—wrought iron circles stacked on each other. That spot, that little visual of that area was what really sold me. It wasn’t a room, it was a door. I walked out and just went, ‘That’s it. Yeah, that’s it.’ ”

The purchase was the easy part. Refurbishment was something of a trial. “I love my house. Love it. It feels very symbolic to me—it was two years in the making, in the redoing of it. Something about creating a foundation with someone. It is a fascinating process, and I really do believe it’s such a test to a relationship that—it’s the same thing as the stories you hear about having babies; it is hard doing a house together. And if you make it through that, man, you can make it through anything. And I mean—luckily he was gone for five months of the time and I got to move in and do that. We really probably would have hung each other from trees.”

It has to be said on behalf of houses that they don’t wake up crying at 4 a.m. So, with six bedrooms and Friends wrapping up, perhaps it’s time for the blessed event that’s had an eager public and overeager press interested for a while now?

“Yeah,” says Aniston with a directness that’s surprising for someone under such scrutiny. “It’s time. It’s time. You know? I think you can work with a baby, I think you can work pregnant, I think you can do all of it. So I’m just truly looking forward to slowing down.”

Aniston demurs on setting a timetable for babymaking, but she cooperates in doing the math for the couple’s year: “I’m finishing [Friends] the end of January, he’ll be finishing [Mr. and Mrs. Smith, opposite Angelina Jolie] probably the end of February. Then he starts Ocean’s Twelve. So I thankfully will be able to go and travel with him while he’s doing that.”

And that Friends finale—what kind of summing up has she foreseen?

“I’m going to miss the whole thing. You know, Danny DeVito just did our show, and he was saying, like, a year later it hits. . . . The most consistent thing I’ve had in my entire life has been this television show and these people, and they’re my heart and soul and I can’t even imagine . . . It’s just an amazing, beautiful thing that we got to have.”

She knows the day will come when she rolls up her Moroccan rugs and unplugs the fax machine in her dressing room. There will be travel, during shared breaks from films—“I’ve never been to Ireland, I’ve never been to Italy. I want to go to Spain. Brad’s never been to Greece, to meet some of my relatives over there.” The script beckoning most strongly to her is an untitled one by Ted Griffin, who wrote Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men. “I wouldn’t call it again a comedy or a drama; I think it’s a little slice of life that has a little bit of everything.

“Life is funny. Life isn’t categorized into drama, comedy, action, is it? So I don’t know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy—why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or . . . I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know. That’s why I don’t like slapstick comedy. I don’t like big, balls-out comedies.”

Well, the trailer for Along Came Polly does show Polly gaping at Ben Stiller as he stands on the toilet with a befouled plunger and water gushing out, and isn’t there a crazed ferret in there somewhere?

“The ferret,” says Aniston, “Ooh, hated the ferret. Of course, I get a ferret of all things to have to hold and cuddle with. The trainer says, ‘Look, you can switch it from hand to hand and just look how—he’s so docile, he’s so docile.’ And then Ben gets him and it’s just like”—Aniston mimes some rapid-fire biting motions with a crisp, gnashing sound. “He did get a shot after that.

“This movie makes me laugh. I think it’s worth seeing. I think it’s a great date movie.”

And where will those daters head when they emerge?

“They’ll probably go to a restaurant they’ve never dared go into before, take a chance on Thai food. Or Ethiopian food, if they don’t eat that. And maybe ask out that quirky person they’ve been thinking about but wasn’t really their type. ’Cause I don’t know if we’re always the best judge of what’s right for us and what’s good for us. Let’s take out—take some of the rules away. Living has so many rules. Ugh.”

It is mentioned to Aniston that a recent network show on “keeping the love in your marriage” flashed a picture of her and her spouse on the screen. “Yeah, like we’re the prototype.” She grins at the thought. “We’re all out there doing the best we can, you know. We’re all doing the best we can. There’s nothing different. That’s all it is. Talking to each other. Being honest with each other and trusting each other. It’s all you need.”

That, and a certain ingredient she prescribed for the Along Came Polly wrap party? Aniston nods emphatically. “Don’t stop having fun. That is important. Go out on dates, you know. Go be romantic and stupid together and just have fun. Don’t lose the fun.”

This article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of PREMIERE magazine.