14 DAY TRIAL // Jennifer Aniston almost never talks about her split from first husband Brad Pitt, even though it would be a sure way to get media attention, despite the fact that it occurred many years ago. It seems that the more she refuses to engage in conversation on the topic, the more interest from the tabloid media and the fans increases.
In her most recent chat with CBS, she did just that: she openly talked about the split, in an effort to explain and understand the fascination everyone else seems to experience where it’s concerned.
This did little in terms of helping her understand the phenomenon, but it did offer fans an idea of where she’s at after all these years. She’s just fine, in case you were wondering.
A narrative constructed by the media
Aniston is promoting her latest movie, the indie “Cake,” in which she plays a woman in chronic pain who is addicted to painkillers and is harboring suicidal thoughts. The film has already earned her a couple of major nominations and even put her in the running for an Oscar nod in the Best Actress category, or so industry insiders believe.
Even if that doesn’t pan out, there is no denying this: it’s a role like Aniston has never done before, for which she agreed to go bare without makeup and stylists, for which she ditched her sense of humor and dug deep into her emotions for something to help her relate to this woman she was playing, who believed life had nothing more to give to her.
So now that she’s promoting it, she probably expected the divorce question to come up, because she wasn’t surprised by it at all.
As you can see in the video below, which is the segment in which she talks about the divorce (the interview is available in full on CBS), Aniston says that she doesn’t find it “painful” to hear people talking about her divorce; but it’s not exactly pleasant either.
The fascination people have with her is a narrative constructed by the media, she says. In real-life, she and Brad are just a regular divorced couple: they occasionally exchange well-wishes, but they do not keep in contact regularly. And no, she is not pining after him still.
It’s all “static”
That last part is a tabloid construction, she says. All the “rumors” and the fake reports, which she once tried so hard to refute, are “BS,” “static,” like a daytime soap opera about celebrities.
Aniston says she doesn’t understand how this works or why people are buying into it, but at least now she understands what she’s dealing with. She and fiancé Justin Theroux are experts at shutting all that noise out now, she adds.
Meanwhile, Brad too has moved on, with longtime partner (and now wife) Angelina Jolie, with whom he has 6 children.