Media darling Jennifer Aniston has said her first love, who died of a brain tumor years after they dated, would probably have been “the one.”
“He was my first love — five years we were together,”
she told The New York Times. “He would have been the one. But I was 25, and I was stupid. He must have sent me Justin to make up for it all.”
The conversation came up with Aniston, who is engaged to Justin Theroux, star of HBO’s “The Leftovers,” while promoting her new film "Cake."
Aniston, who is plagued continually by the media about her private life, also talked about the double standard in Hollywood.
“You don’t see a lot of men getting asked: ‘Why aren’t you married? Why aren’t you having children?’ You don’t get the ‘Well, they seem to play the same thing over and over again,’ and some of them do,” Aniston said, no doubt referring to the fact that she was slotted into particular roles after “Friends.”
Earlier in the NYT conversation, she’d made reference, several times, to a
Guardian reviewer who said “Cake” showcased Anisons’s “hitherto hidden acting chops.” The movie has gotten mixed reviews before its Jan. 23 release date.
“You have to do something really dark to be taken seriously, I guess,” Aniston told the Times. “If you’re in someone’s living room every week for 10 years and every day on God knows what network, people are going to have a hard time saying, ‘OK, we’re going to see you do what now?’ without making associations.”
Many, though, acknowledged the excellence of
Aniston’s work in “Cake.” Betsy Sharkey of The Los Angeles Times said, “So for all the pain, grief, sadness and suicide that layers ‘Cake,’ it is a serious treat to see the actress stretch herself. Hopefully this film won’t turn out to be a single slice.”