The 51-year-old actress opened up about being typecast during an all-female Hollywood roundtable discussion.
Jennifer Aniston just wanted a break from Rachel Green! The 51-year-old Friends star opened up on The Hollywood Reporter's Drama Actress Roundtable about trying to escape the sitcom role that shot her to stardom.
"I could not get Rachel Green off of my back for the life of me. I could not escape Rachel from Friends, just Rachel from Friends, it's on all the time and you're just like, 'Stop playing this f**king show,'" Aniston quipped. "I completely just fought with myself and who I was in this industry forever because it was just constantly about trying to prove I was more than that."
Aniston recalled how her role in the 2002 film The Good Girl helped her to step outside of her image as Rachel.
"The Good Girl was the first time I got to really shed whatever the Rachel character was, and to be able to disappear into someone who wasn’t, that was such a relief to me," she recalled. "But I remember the panic that set over me, thinking, 'Oh God, I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe they’re right. Maybe everybody else is seeing something I’m not seeing, which is you are only that girl in the New York apartment with the purple walls.' So, I was almost doing it for myself just to see if I could do something other than that. And it was terrifying because you’re doing it in front of the world."
Despite her desire to distance herself from playing the world's worst coffee waitress, Aniston recently spoke with Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow about looking back with nostalgia at her time on the beloved sitcom.
"I love stumbling on a Friends episode. This one time I was with Courteney [Cox], and we were trying to find something to reference, an old Friends thing," Aniston said in Variety's Actors on Actors issue. "And then we stumbled on... bloopers online and we sat there at the computer like two nerds watching these bloopers laughing at ourselves."
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