Jennifer Makes Good

Monday, Aug. 19, 2002 By JESS CAGLE

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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 Aniston's Rachel, pregnant and torn between two suitors; in the cliff-hanger season finale, she gave birth. 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).