Interview: Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston pulls into the Tower on Sunset in her silver Jag. She is running late. To make amends, she waves, comic-frantically, as she parks. That’s the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. As in, ground zero for West Hollywood: next door to Spago’s, and just down the street from the Viper Room, the Whiskey and Larry Flynt’s Hustler store.

Aniston parks beneath a Neil Diamond billboard. (Later, she will confide that her earliest musical memories involve singing along to her mom’s Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow records.) The poster facing the Neil Diamond billboard reads like a rebuke: SNOOP DOGG PRESENTS: BAD AZZ. Aniston is wearing a black ribbed tank top, gray shorts, sandals and brown-tinted sunglasses. She is tan and slender. Her jean jacket is tied around her waist.

Aniston is running late because it’s her second day back at work on Friends after summer hiatus. It’s the eighth and final season for the NBC sitcom that put Aniston on the star map. “We’re shooting a wedding banquet, and banquet scenes are always a debacle,” she says over her shoulder as we enter the store. (On the door: a splashy poster of Aniston’s husband and Julia Roberts in The Mexican.)

Inside, Aniston pulls a crumpled piece of paper from her purse. “I have a list of shit I need to buy,” she says. It is a handwritten list, scrawled erratically on the back of a fax page. For a famous person, Aniston seems wholly unconcerned by the fact that she is in public, in a relatively small store with narrow aisles, sans big floppy hat, false mustache or any other form of disguise.

“Brad said get this band Ours,” Aniston says. “Do you know them? I guess they’re one of those junior-Radiohead bands. I haven’t heard them. I imagine there must be a lot of bands like that now, because everyone wants to be Radiohead.” Shrug. “I’d like to be Radiohead. It’s not a bad thing.”

Aniston confesses that music plays a major role in her life with Brad Pitt: “We do have similar tastes — very eclectic in that we’ll listen to pretty much anything. We also go through phases together, like that band Bran Van 3000, their first album. When we started dating, we were listening to a lot of Radiohead. They just sounded so good at that point in our relationship.”

We walk down a Rock/Pop/Soul aisle. “All right, Aniston, focus,” she says. We stop by the H’s. “Which Hendrix did he want?” she mutters to herself. A big guy with tats and a rockabilly pompadour walks by. Aniston has shifted her sunglasses to her head. “I haven’t been here in, like, 10 years,” she adds. “The last two times I came, people totally freaked out right next to me.”

Aniston is not alluding to freakouts of the fan variety. A decade ago, she was not famous — so not famous, it would be two more years before she uttered the words, “I got Leprechaun — fuckin’ A!” — after being cast in the mercifully forgotten 1993 horror film that marked her screen debut. No, Aniston is referring to freakouts of the street-lunatic variety. “I attract that,” she says. “Once in New York, I must have been in 11th grade, and there was this homeless guy on the street who looked just like Santa. Beard. Huge guy. Big gut.” Aniston puffs her cheeks and mimes a big gut with her hands. “So everyone’s walking by him, finding him all cute and charming. Then I come by, and he slugs me across the face! And everyone else just kept walking. Because, you know, nobody wants to get hit by Santa.”

A few moments later, a suspicious-looking guy beelines past three other customers and tries to sell Aniston a $25 Tower gift card. He’ll let her have it for 20. She grins faintly, not enough so the guy would even notice, and says, “No thanks, dude, I’m all set.”

That would be an understatement. Never mind that Aniston, 32, and Pitt, 37, have just celebrated their first anniversary and reportedly are about to move into a $15 million Beverly Hills mansion. With Friends earning each Friend $750,000 an episode, Aniston is among the highest-paid actresses on the tube. She will also be attending the Emmys on September 16th, having been nominated for her role as Rachel. For Aniston, whose film work has been spotty (Remember Picture Perfect? No. That’s the point), the TV nomination is a validation. Rachel began the show as a spoiled rich girl trying to cope with the working world, but by this late date, the Friends have all sort of morphed into a UniFriend, and so now Rachel’s most distinguishing trait is also Aniston’s: They’re very funny. Aniston isn’t always “on” in an annoying, actorly way. But she is a deft physical comedian, in that she uses her body to wrap, stamp and deliver jokes. On the show and in life, Aniston does this by flashing you a big-eye, or theatrically steeling her jaw or furrowing her brow. When she sits, she hunches forward, elbows on knees, letting you know she’s about to tell a tale. Her tales often involve swooping hand gestures.

Aniston mentions how musicians in the Eighties had something to be pissed off about, with Reagan in the White House. I ask her what she thinks of Bush. She vents about him in detail, eloquently, but off the record. She says she doesn’t want to come off like another actor blathering about politics. On the record, she’ll only say, “Bush is a fucking idiot,” and flip him a double-bird, and that Jenna Bush — the Bush daughter whose underage drinking has proved embarrassing for the administration — had a summer internship at Brillstein-Grey, the management firm where she and Pitt are represented. “We’d pass her in the hall,” Aniston says, “and Brad would say, ‘Heyyyy, Jenna, wanna beer? I got one in the truck!'”