“The weird thing about The Good Girl was that suddenly all these people were like, ‘Wow, look what you can do!’” adds the 33-year-old actress, who had previously earned raves for her roles in Office Space and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Object of My Affection. “Like I’ve been doing sh---y work for the last nine years or something. Suddenly they’re like, ‘Hey, she’s really an actress,’ as if I were just some bulls--- comedienne before.”
“People who do comedy are always underrated because they make it look so easy,” says Aniston’s agent, Kevin Huvane. “So it was exciting to see Jen challenge herself with a film like The Good Girl—which is pretty much the antithesis of ‘Friends’—and get the sort of recognition she deserves. I don’t think there’s any limit to what she can do.”
The film has opened up a “whole new horizon” for her she says. “It feels like this new set of opportunities.” For instance, she’s been thinking about doing a Broadway musical. “Singing scares me, so I think that might be fun.”
Which is not to say that she’s about to forgo her comedic roots. Despite the Oscar buzz swirling around her dramatic turn in The Good Girl, she’ll return to comedy in both Bruce Almighty and a new project by Meet the Parents writer John Hamburg. “It’s a pretty big departure for her,” Hamburg notes. “She plays this wild woman who draws Ben Stiller out of his shell—someone who’s very loose, which is not the way Rachel is at all.” Hamburg chuckles. “I mean, I’m not asking Jennifer to wear a prosthetic nose or anything, but it’s very different, and she’s very conscious of that. I remember when she first came on the set, she said, ‘If you feel like I start doing a Rachel thing, just tell me, okay?’”
As is true of many comic performers, Aniston developed her breezy charm to cope with a difficult childhood. Born in the San Fernando Valley to struggling actors John and Nancy, she spent her kindergarten year in Greece before the family relocated to New York’s Upper West Side, where her father found work playing the sexy devil Victor on Days of Our Lives. But as the marriage disintegrated, Aniston found herself trying desperately to ease the tension. “I was always the mediator,” she says. “I was always trying to smooth things over and get everybody to laugh.” Despite her best efforts, her parents divorced when she was nine, and she spent the rest of her childhood living with her mother and unwittingly honing her comedic timing with a steady after-school diet of sitcoms. “God, I loved ‘Joanie Loves Chachi,’” she says with a grin. “We didn’t have a VCR, so I used to sit by the TV with a tape recorder when it was on, and then go to sleep singing along with the theme song.”
