MORE
POWER
TO HER
Tuning out the noise
while blazing a trail
for herself and others,
Jennifer Aniston
is looking to the
future with a
renewed focus
t’salready been a year of milestones for Hollywood
golden girl Jennifer Aniston. First, the actress who
shotto fame on ’90s sitcom Friends celebrated her
50th birthday at a star-studded bash with Amal
Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow and ex-husband Brad Pitt
among the guests. Then, her most recent lm,
Murder Mystery, in which she stars alongside Adam
Sandler, enjoyed the biggest-ever opening weekend
fora Net ix original lm, with more than 30 million
accounts tuning in during its rst three days.
Fifteen years on from her history-making run as
the highest-paid actress on television (alongside
Friends’ two other female leads, Courteney Cox and
LisaKudrow, a position achieved thanks to Jen’s role
inpushing for a group salary negotiation that saw
eachof the six core cast members receive the same
paythroughout the show’s 10-year run), Jen remains
everybit a badass – and a feminist powerhouse who
continues to bat for women on and off screen. Later
this year, the star who once interviewed GloriaSteinem at a female leadership summit will take the
spotlight in Apple TV+’s The Morning Show alongside
friend and fellow Hollywood trailblazer Reese
Witherspoon. Reese is also on a mission to bring
female stories to the fore, doing so most recently
with Big Little Lies, and both women are executive
producers on the new series, which delves into the
inherently sexist world of breakfast television.
“Through the prism of those under-slept, over-
adrenalised people in front of and behind the
camera, we take an honest look at the complex
relationships between women and men in the
workplace, and we engage in the conversations
people are a little too afraid to have unless they’re
behind closed doors,” said Jen at an event in March.Canary in e mine
I
f you think it all sounds very ‘Time’s Up’, you’d be
right. It’s a cause close to Jen’s heart; she donated
half a million dollars to the movement’s Legal
Defence Fund when it was established in January- By then, everyone should have seen it coming.
A full 18 months beforehand, having nally had
enough of the salacious gossip that had dogged her
since her marriage to Brad Pitt ended in 2005, and
which marrying Justin Theroux in 2015 did nothing
to cease, Jen had called time herself in an epic op-ed
for online news site HuffPost. Prompted by the
latest of many ‘bump watch’ headlines, the essay »
COVER STORY
22 NEXT / SEPTEMBER 2019