14 DAY TRIAL // Few would expect to see Jennifer Aniston’s name uttered in connection to an Academy Award for Best Actress, but 2015 promises to be the year that will change all that. This December sees the release of an independent movie called “Cake,” for which Aniston is already getting lots of Oscar buzz.
Though she usually plays leads in rom-coms, Aniston is more famous for her glamorous image. Whether her movies are successful or not, the former “Friends” actress is always stylish, beautiful, flawless.
This was where she had to start when it came to transforming herself into Claire Simmons, her character from “Cake,” she told Deadline during its The Contenders panel.
A refreshing change from the norm
Jennifer Aniston knows very well what critics think of her, just like she knows her rom-com appeal is fading away. In recent years, she’s tried really hard to switch things up, either by taking different roles or stepping behind the camera for a change, to hone other skills.
From the reviews coming out of this year’s TIFF, where “Cake” was screened, it seems that she’s en route to great success with this new role, in which she plays a “regular” woman who initiates a relationship with a widower while she is confronting her own demons from the past.
Unlike Jennifer, Claire doesn’t always have the perfect hairstyle, she’s not put together and doesn’t wear designer clothes. Claire hardly ever puts on makeup, she wears baggy clothes, and she couldn’t care less about how she presents herself to the rest of the world.
This was a change for Aniston, who told the panel that, the moment she agreed to play the part, she’d gotten “ready to disappear.”
Wearing no makeup was liberating
Aniston didn’t just gain a bit of weight and started wearing baggy, shapeless clothes for the role. She also ditched the makeup team and had to have prosthetic scars put on her face at the start of every working day.
She found the experience of not having to sit in the makeup chair for hours on end “So fabulous, and so dreamy and empowering and liberating,” she says. “The only time I had to sit in the makeup chair was just for scars.”
As it happens, not wearing any makeup was also the first thing that got her role in the headlines. For instance, the photo above, snapped by paparazzi on the set in Los Angeles, went viral precisely because it shows her in a way audiences had not seen her before.
And even if she doesn’t get an Oscar this year (or not even a nomination), at least “Cake” will serve to boost Aniston’s confidence that she can do whatever she sets her mind to. With her next project, she might risk even more, because she’s tried it once already and knows what it feels like to have your work appreciated.