The movie that “sucked the life” out of Jennifer Aniston so much she almost quit acting
Jennifer Aniston is the epitome of a household name, as it’s hard to imagine any actor having recognition quite as broad as the fame the cast of Friends got the second that show shot into the stratosphere of popularity.
Even off that one specific set, Aniston was on a whole different level. In the early 2000s, especially, she was in a run of successful rom-coms, was married and then divorcing another mega-star, all while wrapping up Friends. So surely by the time the new millennium, even the mid-point of its first decade, she was probably set for life.
She may not have ever worked again, but passion for the form kept her sticking to it and auditioning; however, when you look at Aniston’s filmography, it becomes incredibly clear that she has fallen into the pit of typecasting.
In almost every role, you will find her playing one of three sorts of characters: the sweet, loving wife and mother, the one that got away, or the intimidating yet hot woman who’s maybe the male lead’s boss or colleague. In short, Aniston is always a romantic lead or a maternal one.
While she didn’t name the project directly, that’s likely why she hit a breaking point recently of genuinely considering quitting acting. “The last two years, [quitting acting] has crossed my mind, which it never did before,” she said on the Smartless podcast as she seems to have hit the end of her tether.
This is all speculative, but Aniston said she filmed one particularly painful project “two years” before her Apple TV+ series The Morning Show, which would mean Mother’s Day, an especially dull and uninspiring 2016 rom-com.
She explained, “It was after a job I had completed, and I was like, ‘Woah, that sucked the life out of me… I don’t know if this is what interests me’”. The reasons why were myriad as she added that it was “an unprepared project”, but there’s also the suggestion that perhaps the type of role Aniston found herself once again playing simply wasn’t inspiring her.
Playing a divorced mum feels cliché for a woman of her age, and a lot of women in Hollywood end up feeling that. Kirsten Dunst said, “There’s definitely less good roles for women my age,” with names like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman also discussing how the depth of characters given to women beyond their teens, 20s or early 30s seems to plummet, instead casting them simply as maternal figures or hags. Given that Aniston was asked to be in a movie all to do with Mother’s Day, likely that same stagnated feeling hit hard, especially after a long career of always playing the same person.
However, maybe it was actually as simple as the actor made it out. “You always say, ‘Never again, never again, I would never back up into a start date’… And the script isn’t ready,” she said on the podcast hosted by a gaggle of male actors, blaming her consideration of quitting all on an unfinished script.
