The actress is entering into 'one of the most creatively fulfilling periods of my life.'
Jennifer Aniston is loving life at 50!
The veteran TV star is getting ready to return to the medium that made her famous as one of the two female leads on Apple TV’s The Morning Show.
“I’m entering into what I feel is one of the most creatively fulfilling periods of my life,” she tells the New York Times in a new profile. “Seriously. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I feel like it’s just about to really bloom.”
And with that fulfillment comes tackling a character with whom she can really relate. Aniston will be playing news anchor Alex, whom many in the industry have noted as being past her prime and who is having to fight for her spot at the anchor desk.
“There’s similarity to my life,” she admits. “I relate in ways of feeling like, when you don’t want to be seen, and you don’t want to go out of the house, and you want to just scream, and you don’t want to walk on a red carpet. I don’t want to stand behind a podium, I don’t want to have my photograph taken, I just want to cry today. You know?”
The show deals heavily with the #MeToo movement, specifically mirroring the fall of a top TV anchor, a la Matt Lauer. Though Aniston notes she hasn’t experienced any of her own #MeToo moments, she does say she’s witnessed plenty of sexism in the industry.
“Agents, studios, finding out what this actor made versus that actor made,” she lists.
One area that she had to struggle to break into was producing. Aniston serves as a producer on The Morning Show, but the journey was not an easy one.
“When we started, even though Jen had been on a TV series of eight years, it was still a little like, ‘Oh, isn’t that cute,’” Kristin Hahn, Aniston’s longtime friend and producing partner, notes.
Together with Aniston’s now-ex-husband Brad Pitt, they started the production company Plan B, which later became Bloc Productions. When Aniston and Pitt split, the Friends star and Hahn decided to leave the company.
“It was the symbolic equivalent of, ‘I’ll move out of the house,’” Hahn says.
They went on to form their own company, Echo Films.
“Our mission statement was, Tell strong stories about strong women. Flawed, complicated, messy. ‘Cause that wasn’t happening,” Aniston says.
As for where she currently is in life and her career, Aniston notes, “It’s taken time for me to get where I am and I put a lot of work into my craft. I’ve failed. I’ve succeeded. I’ve overcome. I’ve, you know, I’ve stayed around. I’m still here.”
For more, watch the clip below:
RELATED CONTENT:
