Jennifer Aniston made a name in the industry as Rachel Green in the hit TV sitcom Friends during the '90s. As she did the show for 10 years, the 51-year-old star was afraid to be typecast, struggling to escape her famous character.
Jennifer Aniston wanted to prove that she was more than what she did when she played the iconic role of Rachel Green. Fortunately, after Friends, she has made a lot of movies, proving she has the skill and talent.
In a discussion on The Hollywood Reporter's Drama Actress Roundtable, Brad Pitt's former wife revealed the difficulty she experienced to "shed" the role she used to play for a decade. She told fellow actresses, Janelle Monáe, Zendaya, Reese Witherspoon, Helena Bonham Carter, and Rose Byrne, she felt exhausted for being typecast after the show ended.
She admitted that she could not get Rachel Green off of her back at the time. She could not escape the character and the show was on all the time that she wanted to stop it.
Thankfully, she got the role of Justine in the 2002 film The Good Girl. From here, she started to be known beyond her character as Rachel Green. It was the time that she was successfully able to shed off her Friends character, giving her the chance to remove the image of someone who she was not.
Jennifer Aniston continued that it was a total relief for her. Anyhow, she could never deny that she also panicked, worrying she could not perfectly play another character at all. So, she did it for herself to see if she could do something other than playing Rachel Green's role.
What made her terrified more was that she had to do it in "front of the world." Jennifer Aniston did what she could to fight for herself and who she was in the industry.
It was a constant battle for her to prove that she was more than that person. Fortunately, when she aged, she got that freedom of not giving a care about it anymore.
Meanwhile, doing the show for 10 years, Justin Theroux's ex admitted that she had been recently revisiting Friends episodes. Recalling the first-ever table read with Lisa Kudrow in Variety's Actors on Actors series, she still had a vivid memory of what was her 56-year-old co-star looked like at the time.
She remembered Lisa Kudrow wearing an "appropriate Phoebe Buffay outfit with a bunch of "seashells and necklaces on." She also had little blonde tendrils then. Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston, along with the original cast Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and Matthew Perry, will be once again reunited for HBO Max's Friends reunion.
