This story first appeared in the Jan. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Just last week, all around Hollywood the words “Jennifer Aniston” and “Oscar nomination” were being mentioned in the same breath. The Friends star had made a stunning switch to serious drama with Cake, a roughly $7 million indie release that opens Jan. 23; the movie had debuted at the Toronto Film Festival to terrific reviews for the actress, if not for the film itself; she had Harvey Weinstein‘s former awards consultant, Lisa Taback, on the case; and a nomination looked teed up and ready to go.
Then on Thursday, Jan. 15, at 5:40 a.m., the rug was pulled out from under the movie. Hours after Aniston’s triumphant appearance at Cake‘s Los Angeles premiere, with a nomination from every other major voting body in Hollywood under her belt, a swirl of “SNUBBED!” headlines emerged when the best actress nominations were announced and they didn’t include the star. After Selma (which landed just two noms, for picture and song), the Aniston rebuke was the dominant entertainment story du jour.
“I know a lot of people were sorry,” she says, speaking the day after the nominations. “I feel I’ve gotten such wonderful love — I had almost more phone calls and flowers than I did for any other nomination [in the past].”
Whatever pain or anger she may have felt, whatever disappointment or sense of loss (and let’s not kid ourselves: Every Oscar snub feels acute to even the strongest person), Aniston never let on. She even joked about it a few days later on Ellen, calling herself “the number-one snubbed” (an honor that might perhaps belong to Selma director Ava DuVernay). She was exactly what millions of fans who have known her for two decades wanted her to be: funny and self-deprecating and exquisitely human.
Other actresses might have induced a tsunami of schadenfreude. But Aniston’s enduring appeal is rooted in the very fact that she can be hurt, again and again — whether by the Oscars or the Sexiest Man Alive — and she’ll endure. She’s rich and glamorous and famous, but she’s also one of us: a real person with a beating heart.
We sit in Aniston’s cavernous Bel Air living room, with the city spreading out through the floor-length windows. It is Jan. 8, a week before the nominations are to be announced, but right now other things are on her mind.
“I’ve cried deeply,” she says. “I’ve felt immense loss in my life. Anybody who’s felt pain or loss that has sent you to your knees knows [what that’s like].”
Her words catch me by surprise. We’re halfway through a two-hour interview, and the frothy, fizzy woman I thought I knew so well from Friends has shed her professional shell, revealing a more complex and perhaps vulnerable person inside.
She’s just slid off the long, gray sofa where she was sitting in her somewhat minimalist home and now is kneeling on the floor, one arm propped on a coffee table, in jeans and a T-shirt, looking remarkably young and well-toned. Her hair, the most scrutinized in modern media, is of course perfect; her rather artificial tan, less so — but then she’s fresh from a photo shoot and hasn’t had time to wipe it off.
I hear a hint of regret, though she insists, “I feel very happy. Life is quite extraordinary.” The words “pain,” “anger” and “control” pop up throughout our conversation — and not just in relation to Cake, a heavy drama in which she plays a woman dealing with debilitating pain following a deadly car crash.
