Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.friends
Titolo: JA: vero o falso?

True or false? Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt have stopped smoking in
order to have a baby. "False," says Aniston. "We do want to have a
baby. We will eventually quit smoking." 
Aniston, 33, is perched on her living-room sofa in her little house
tucked into the Hollywood Hills. The only thing smoking at the moment
is a stick of incense on the coffee table. Aniston is playing a game
of true or false, in which the reporter reads aloud some factoids
gleaned from the tabloids. True or false? Aniston and her husband
exist in a perpetually stoned state, barely visible to each other
through a haze of marijuana smoke.
"False," says Aniston, adding that if she were stoned, "I'd barely be
able to have a conversation with you." Aniston likes this game, and
soon she is recalling all the outlandish things she has read about
herself. "Also," she says, "I don't crush aspirin into my shampoo for
my flaky scalp." 
Right now, Aniston is one of the most recognizable and written-about
women on the planet. Even as she was winning raves from critics last
week for her performance in The Good Girl, a dark little independent
comedy, she could be seen on the front page of a tabloid that promised
details of her stormy marriage to the equally photogenic Pitt.
(According to the tab, she hates her movie-star husband's scraggly
beard. "False," she says.) 
Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding her personal life - entire forests
have been denuded in order to detail her grooming habits - Aniston's
impressive traits as an actress are often ignored: her unfailing comic
timing and her surprising range. Friends, NBC's impeccably prepared
weekly meal of comfort food, seemed to be rediscovered by audiences
after Sept. 11, and what they found was [SPOILER] Navfgba'f Enpury,
certanag naq gbea orgjrra gjb fhvgbef; va gur pyvss-unatre frnfba
svanyr, fur tnir ovegu [/SPOILER]. Soon thereafter, Aniston scored an
Emmy nomination. She has been likened to Mary Tyler Moore, who as Mary
Richards created a similar mixture of yearning, courage and
frustration. "Jen doesn't like to overwork things," says Friends
co-star Matt LeBlanc. "She has a real fresh loose-cannon-y thing about
her that's real exciting to work with." 
During her breaks from the series, Aniston has journeyed to the big
screen, usually in romantic comedies, but like the five other Friends,
she has had trouble convincing the world she can play something beyond
her cute TV persona. "Yeah, keep your day job," says Aniston,
laughing. "If we didn't have that pressure of being the Friends cast,
we'd get away scot-free." 
All that changed last week with the release of The Good Girl. Now
Aniston is getting the best reviews of her career - the kind of
reviews that can lead to Oscar nominations. In the film, she stars as
Justine, a small-town Texas woman with a dead-end job behind the
makeup counter of a discount store called the Retail Rodeo. Married to
a lug (John C. Reilly) who is lacking in both smarts and sperm count,
Justine embarks on a disastrous affair with a troubled young co-worker
(Jake Gyllenhaal). 
It was screenwriter Mike White (see box) who came up with the idea of
casting Aniston. "I thought it would be fresh," he says. "Who wouldn't
want to see America's sweetheart get blackmailed for sex and try to
institutionalize her boyfriend and cheat on her husband? I just wasn't
sure she'd respond to the material." Aniston responded immediately:
"It felt like an opportunity - a terrifying opportunity - to go out
there on a limb." 
With a salary of $1 million per episode of Friends, she knew that she
would have to take a drastic pay cut for the low-budget movie, and
that she would have to de-Rachel herself - drop the bouncy walk and
the fluttery hand movements. "There's no lilt in Justine," says
Aniston. "Life is hanging on her shoulders. On our first day of
rehearsing, my acting coach said, 'Sit on your hands.' You don't
realize you do these things. No wonder everybody says, 'She's Rachel,
she's Rachel, she's Rachel.'" 
Aniston swears she doesn't know if Rachel will end up with Joey or
Ross, or neither (shooting on the series resumes this week), but she
is certain the ninth season of Friends will be its last. "Enough with
the 'We're gonna stay, we're leaving,' and then 'No, we're not,'" she
says. The success of The Good Girl is a good omen for her post-Friends
employment prospects. Her movie career got another boost recently when
she signed to co-star in the new Jim Carrey comedy, Bruce Almighty.
True or false? The Aniston-Pitt marriage is on the rocks; he's a
homebody, and she prefers parties and premieres. "False," says
Aniston. "What's fun about a premiere?" Aniston's most endearing trait
may be that she's wholly lacking in movie-star pretension. She and
Pitt are frequently spotted hanging out in L.A., easygoing and
accessible, without an entourage or phalanx of bodyguards. They are
often trailed by a photographer, but she doesn't gripe about the
press. Not usually, anyway. Aniston recently settled--"amicably"--a
lawsuit against two magazine publishers for running topless photos of
her in 1999. "You pick your battles," she says. "I drew the line when
someone crawled into my backyard and took a naked photo of me." 
Except for the dozens of pricey sunglasses on a table by the front
door, you wouldn't know a star lived in this modest house high above
Sunset Boulevard. Books and papers are stacked everywhere. Part of the
living room is a makeshift office. She has outgrown the place, yet her
eyes well up when she talks about selling it. "I'm having moving-on
anxiety," she says. "But it will be on the market when we get closer
to moving into our damn home." That home is a stately mansion she and
Pitt purchased in Beverly Hills for a reported $14 million. True or
false? "That's something else," she says. "How expensive this mansion
is. I'm not going to tell you how much it cost, but it's not ..." She
stops herself, feeling silly for complaining. "It's funny to me," she
says. "Whatever." With that, she shrugs and moves on to the next
question.
-- 
j./All opinions expressed herein are solely those of my friend, Buck 
the squirrel.
Still alive (very alive) on Wednesday at 19:54:35 - 
http://www.iftf.it

"I'm having moving-on anxiety,"
principiante, altroche' :) 
-- 
'you're either part of the solution, 
 or you're part of the precipitate.'