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“All the years and years and years of speculation. … It was really hard,” the actress and producer says of the media attention around her attempts to start a family.
By Abbey White
Associate Editor & News Writer
Jennifer Aniston is getting personal and discussing her effort to start a family and turning to IVF, experiences she describes as “really hard shit” in a new interview.
Speaking to Allure for a wide-ranging December cover story published on Wednesday, the Morning Show actress and producer opened up about her current place in Hollywood, launching a hair care line, and attempts to get pregnant in her late 30s and 40s. It was something Aniston admits “no one” was really aware of — with intention.
“I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she explained. “All the years and years and years of speculation. … It was really hard.”
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The Murder Mystery star said she has “zero regrets” about her efforts, and even felt “a little relief” because there’s nothing left to speculate or question about her attempts to get pregnant. It’s something that now, she said, “I don’t have to think about that anymore.”
“I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it,” Aniston said. “So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”
Aniston added that the emotional difficulty around her pregnancy efforts was exacerbated by headlines that implied her personal timeline for starting a family was “just selfish,” resulting in a media narrative that was “absolute lies.”
“I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid,” she said. “It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”
Her self-described frustration around that narrative is ultimately why she chose to write her 2016 Huffington Post op-ed. “I was like, ‘I’ve just got to write this because it’s so maddening and I’m not superhuman to the point where I can’t let it penetrate and hurt.’”
While it was a challenging and emotionally exhausting time for Aniston, it was also transformative, leaving the Hollywood star in a new place where she said that now, she just doesn’t “fucking care.”
“I would say my late 30s, 40s, I’d gone through really hard shit, and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be,” she said. “That’s why I have such gratitude for all those shitty things. Otherwise, I would’ve been stuck being this person that was so fearful, so nervous, so unsure of who they were.”
At another point in the interview, Aniston talked about joining social media in 2020 — despite hating that form of communication because she’s “not good at it” — and its relationship to her hair care line.
“It’s torture for me. The reason I went on Instagram was to launch this line,” she explained. “Then the pandemic hit and we didn’t launch. So I was just stuck with being on Instagram. It doesn’t come naturally.”
Her discomfort with social media is strong and embedded in how the internet can make women of all ages feel. It’s something Aniston says she was happy she didn’t have when she was growing up. “Look, the internet, great intentions, right? Connect people socially, social networking,” she said. “It goes back to how young girls feel about themselves, compare and despair.”
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