The 2002 movie that let Jennifer Aniston give the middle finger to her critics: “As if I were just some bullshit comedienne”
As Jennifer Aniston and countless others know, the benefits of having a steady income from starring in a popular and long-running sitcom can often be outweighed by the perils of what comes next when it ends.
On one hand, you’ve got Academy Award winners, icons, and A-listers like Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Ryan Reynolds, Michael J Fox, Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all of whom caught early breaks being accompanied by a laugh track, before emigrating to the silver screen and becoming household names.
On the other hand, what’s David Schwimmer been up to recently? Nobody who watched Cheers at the time would have guessed that Woody Harrelson would become a much bigger movie star than Ted Danson or Kelsey Grammer, and then there’s whatever the fuck Kirk Cameron has been doing.
Aniston enjoyed the most success of the Friends cast after the series ended its ten-season run, but as almost all of them discovered, not to mention any Fools Rush In, The Pallbearer, or Lost in Space in particular, trying to establish themselves outside of their Central Perk comfort zone while it was still on the air was more often than not doomed to fail.
Apart from Office Space, she mostly made rom-coms in her free time, which was hardly against type. To combat any potential typecasting and to flip the bird at anyone who thought that frivolous comedy was the only thing she was capable of doing, Aniston went serious with 2002’s The Good Girl.
The early awards season buzz may have amounted to nothing, but it was still a statement of intent, with the sitcom favourite underlining that she could more than hold her own in a challenging role. Even then, some of the compliments were a great deal more back-handed than she would have liked.
“The weird thing about The Good Girl was that suddenly all these people were like, ‘Wow, look what you can do!'” Aniston reflected. “Suddenly, they’re like, ‘Hey, she’s really an actress!’ As if I were just some bullshit comedienne or something.” It was technically praise, albeit praise of the most condescending kind.
Did she capitalise on the film and throw herself into heavy, hard-hitting, and complex dramatic roles once Friends had finally run its course? Did she fuck, it was straight back into mind-numbing rom-coms like Along Came Polly, Rumor Has It, The Break-Up, The Bounty Hunter, and Switch, with Aniston failing to replicate her Good Girl form until the release of 2014’s Cake.
Somehow, she managed to both prove her doubters wrong and right in one fell swoop, and while her film career hasn’t quite caught fire to the extent that many had predicted, The Morning Show is still pretty good.
