Please, please, please don’t do that. Become a lawyer.’ That was my one rebellion. I was hoping that I was going to make it, so that I could prove him wrong. I just kept going. I’m happy he made that claim that he didn’t want me to do it.
Why did you move to LA? My dad had moved to Los Angeles about five years before I had moved out and I was just on a summer vacation to go visit him and I had graduated. I had been graduated from high school for two years and I chose not to go to college and I was pounding the pavement, doing my waitressing, and I had an agent and a manager. Then I came to visit dad in LA and then I just sort of went on a couple of auditions. I asked my friend for 100 bucks so I could get the head shots and then about three months in I got a sit com and that was sort of awesome.
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So why did you want to become an actress? I grew up in New York, and I was born into a family of actors. I remember going to see my first play, which was ‘Children of a Lesser God’ on Broadway. And then I saw ‘Annie’ and it was me, my hairbrush and my record player, for hours on end. But I couldn’t sing, so that wasn’t going to happen. I was also going to a Waldorf school, which didn’t allow you to watch television, but I could go to the theatre. And my dad [John Aniston] was on a soap opera, and is still on a soap opera. So, I wasn’t really allowed to watch television, unless I was home sick, and then they allowed me to watch tv. I remember one morning that I was watching an episode of ‘That Girl’ that my dad was on, and I was overwhelmed that my father was in the television set because I wasn’t quite sure what he did, at that point. So, I really did have that fantasy of it, but I didn’t think I would ever actually achieve it. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I had that creative bug, pretty early on.
Did you have any other jobs before hitting the big time? I worked at an advertising agency, as a receptionist. I worked two days as a bike messenger. It was really wrong to put me on a bike in New York City with taxi cabs. And I worked at an ice cream place in Lincoln Centre. And then, I waitressed for about two and a half years. All the while I was auditioning but I couldn’t even get a commercial. For commercial auditions, you had to go in with three or five people, and they put you in front of a white screen and tell you, ‘You’re at a party. You have a burger, and you have a beer, and you’re flirting with this one. Go!’ it was just so awkward. I was terrible at that. to connect with in the midst of all these other things that were so far away and so far removed from myself.
So what motivated you to keep pursuing your dream? I just had this deep feeling in my gut that somehow something was going to happen, and I just had to be patient. I was hell-bent because my dad was just begging me not to be in the industry. He said, ‘I do not want your heart broken. The rejection is brutal.
So how did Friends come about? It came when I was doing ‘Muddling Through’ and we only did six episodes and the network didn’t think it was going to get picked up so I started going on auditions for ‘second position’ as they call it. So I read the script and I have never had a reaction like that to a show. It was my contemporaries, it was New York City, it was funny, it was interesting, I’d never read anything like it. This guy named David Schwimmer was already cast and Courtney Cox was already cast. I’d seen David Schwimmer at a play at Northwestern because my friend Susannah was going there and I was just visiting her and I remember thinking ‘that guy is so great’. And then ‘Muddling Through’ ended up getting picked up, even though they cast me in ‘friends’ and they picked it up in spite of.. Sort of despite the show which Jim Burrows, who was our beloved director, told me in the pilot. He said, ‘Yeah, they’ll pick this show up because they know this show is going to be a hit’. And I was thinking, ‘No, no one would ever do that!’ and sure enough they did, so there was a period where I had to stand out of the photographs of the group shot. And I had phone calls from girlfriends saying, ‘I’m auditioning for your part in ‘Friends’ and do you have any ideas..’ and I was really surprised that they were actually considering replacing me. But then, thank God, they didn’t find anyone and they just took the chance that ‘Muddling Through’ would fail after the two episodes they picked it up for. So I just sort of did this back and forth from Sony to Warner Bros for two weeks and then it went away – poof, and ‘Friends’ went boom!
So how do you keep your great looks? Well it’s hard work, you know, you work out, you just take care of yourself and, you know, you exercise, you eat right, you sleep, you’re happy. Happiness is the big key.
Is there a part of your body you find hardest to work on? My bu-tt! It just has a tendency to go right and left and I’d like it to go up.
And do you eat healthily? You kind of figure out at a certain age you realise you have to cut some stuff out and get healthy, get with the programme, for a better lifestyle, all across the board.
Did you ever think that almost everything you do would make headline news? No. Nobody does. Especially ridiculous things like most of the stuff that’s not even true. I mean – a haircut! It’s sort of silly yet
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CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW J ENNI F ER ANI S TON
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