For most of her adult life, Jennifer Aniston has been one of the most scrutinised women on the planet.
From her divorce from Brad Pitt in 2005 to her years-long silence on the relentless ‘will she, won’t she’ tabloid obsession over motherhood, Aniston has spent decades learning how to live on her own terms.
At 56, Aniston is in a new season of calm. Her career is thriving, she’s found new love, and she’s using her platform to rewrite a cultural script that for too long cast women like her as tragic figures rather than self-possessed ones.
Her romantic history is well-known, although it is often misrepresented. When Aniston and Brad Pitt split, she was 35 — and immediately confronted with the narrative that her husband had left her because she wouldn’t give him children.
She later called that idea ‘an absolute lie.’ Pitt went on to have six children with Angelina Jolie, while Aniston, who was privately enduring unsuccessful IVF treatments, chose silence over spectacle.
Now, years later, she has reflected on that period with striking honesty in a rare moment of revelation for the famously private star.
‘They didn’t know my story,’ she told Harpers Bazaar, ‘They didn’t know what I’d been going through for twenty years to try to pursue a family because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes.’
She continued to open up, saying, ‘That’s not anybody’s business. But there comes a point when you can’t not hear it – the narrative about how I won’t have a baby, won’t have a family, because I’m selfish, a workaholic. It does affect me – I’m just a human being. We’re all human beings.’
She spoke about her motivation to write an op-ed on her fertility battle in 2016, ‘because I knew a lot of women at the time who were trying to have kids, who were dealing with IVF. So it did feel like it was not only for myself, but for any women who were struggling with the same issue.’
While she said she is grateful that tabloid culture is now less brutal than it was in the 90s, she wondered if that same cruelty has just moved onto social media, saying: ‘So now any schmuck can stay anonymous and write whatever the hell they want to write…’
Her love life, too, has evolved beyond the glossy headlines. After her marriage to actor Justin Theroux ended in 2018, the pair managed to do what few celebrity exes can — remain friends.
When Theroux recently remarried, Aniston was reportedly among the first to send congratulations.
For her part, earlier this year, Aniston was photographed with hypnotist and life coach Jim Curtis, first over Fourth of July weekend and then on a sun-drenched yacht in Mallorca.
She also touched on one of the other most talked about parts of her life, her time on the show Friends. She said of her former castmates: ‘I know that if I needed anything, I’d go direct to the chain we have together and they’d be there for me in two seconds flat,’she sais.
‘It was like we married each other – they’re my family. Sometimes you love to hate your family, but it’s a lifetime commitment, for sure.’
If Aniston’s earlier years were defined by the world telling her story for her, these later years are defined by her insistence on writing it herself.
And for a woman long treated as a mirror of societal expectations, there’s a satisfying irony in the fact that she’s now the one holding up the mirror. ‘The wisdom older women have to contribute,’ she says, ‘is extraordinary.’
The November issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from October 9.
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