Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock have more than just stellar acting careers in common.
Bullock interviewed Aniston for Interview Magazine, and what resulted read like a thread of text messages you’d share with a close friend and then read back again when you missed them — even if you did date the same guy.
“We were trying to remember how we first met, and you and I had completely different memories,” Bullock said, as Aniston replied, “Let’s journey back. I’m trying to remember the year of the Golden Globes, at that little restaurant. CAA always had that party.”
“Yes,” Bullock confirmed, “and we were introduced by our former boyfriend. I say ‘our’ because you and I both partook of this one human being.” Aniston replied “Yes, we did. That’s a beautiful way of saying it.”
“We both partook of Tate [Donovan],” Bullock noted, as Aniston reiterated, “We both partook of Tate.”
Sandra joked that the actor — who made cameos on “Friends,” appeared in “The O.C” and voiced Hercules in the 1997 Disney animated film — “was a very patient human being, given that he dated us both.”
According to Jennifer, Tate “seems to have a type.” Indeed. Sandy pointed out that type was “talented. Funny. Kind. Introspective. Generous,” as Jen added they were also “lovers of architecture” and “lovers of interior design.”
Bullock first partook of Tate when she was engaged to the actor after meeting on the 1992 film, “Love Potion No. 9;” while Aniston partook of the actor, who famously played her love interest, Joshua, on “Friends” from 1995 to 1998.
The two took turns complimenting each other in a way that feels new to society but not to them. “The conversation about women supporting each other and coming together is new,” noted Bullock. Aniston agreed, adding, “but I think we have been doing it for a long time.”
“When I landed in Los Angeles at 20 years old and I fell into those girls who are still sitting around the table today, they were on a different path,” Jen explained of her close-knit friends. “I’d never had a circle of women who got together and talked forever. I was like, ‘God, these California people don’t shut up. They talk about their feelings and cry in front of each other’ I said to myself, ‘Here I am, a girl who grew up in New York City, and now I find myself in Laurel Canyon, wearing a flowery dress and someone put a crystal around my neck and is burning sage around my head. I have landed on Mars.'”
“But I really think it was something that saved me,” she added. “This is a really tough business that we’re in that is not always kind or inclusive or supportive. A lot of the time, it’s the opposite. I remember going to auditions and girls would never want to share anything. Or they would talk to you during your auditions to distract you when they knew you were trying to work on your stuff.”
Aniston said she’s tried her whole life to to focus on the journey and not worry about the outcome, “but as a woman,” Sandra noted, “we don’t often get second chances. But you’ve maintained a career for all these years, and have arrived at a time when all of a sudden women are realizing their value at the box office.”
Jen admitted the feeling was “exciting,” as her friend pointed out, “We get to keep going. We don’t have a shelf life anymore. Our shelf life is whatever we want.”
“We create that,” Jennifer said. “Our industry has expanded its horizons in that way, and I think it’s because women have stood up and said, ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.'”
“Think of the generation ahead of us,” she went on. “So many of those women were put out to pasture when they were 40, and the fact that we get to still be working and are actually coming into our most creative adventures ever at this point in our life — we’re rewriting that narrative that society sort of plastered on us. I remember the messaging to me even in my 30s was, ‘Don’t play a mom, and if you do play a mom make sure it’s to a 3-year-old kid.'”
But according to Aniston, “That’s not the case anymore. You’ve sustained the same career from the time you were in your wee 20s. Is it just a fortunate window of time that we got to enter into the business when we did, and so this moment is happening? Whatever it is, we won’t ever be able to know because who gives a shit, it’s happening. Thirty years from now, we’ll get to look back–“
“–And we’ll all be at the same nursing home,” Bullock interjected. “I’ll help you with your teeth, you’ll help me with my diapers.”
To read the ladies’ full exchange, click here.
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