Jennifer Aniston gets candid about the ‘nasty,’ ‘hurtful’ pregnancy rumours about her

If you passed by a newsstand or checkout counter in the early to mid aughts, you no doubt saw the countless tabloid covers purporting that Jennifer Aniston was pregnant—sometimes with twins! The sheer number of stories about Aniston’s reproductive plans was overwhelming. Like, why? In a new interview the star herself is opening up about the impact the media frenzy had on her, and how she’s learned to tune it out.

“What the tabloids and the media did to people’s personal lives back then, regular people are doing now,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. She jokingly added, “Although I haven’t seen a tabloid in so long. Am I still having twins? Am I going to be the miracle mother at 52?”

Reflecting on how the media scrutiny affected her post-Friends life, Aniston said, “I used to take it all very personally—the pregnancy rumors and the whole, ‘Oh, she chose career over kids’ assumption. It’s like, ‘You have no clue what’s going with me personally, medically, why I can’t…can I have kids?’ They don’t know anything, and it was really hurtful and just nasty…. It’s the same with Dolly Parton; Dolly Parton never had kids. But are people giving her shit for it? No, no one’s tried to put her in a white picket fence.” 

On whether attention toward her private life has affected her professional one, Aniston said, “Well, people certainly project onto you and all that, but my job is to go, ‘Listen, I’ll show you what I’m capable of, and you decide if you want to subscribe.’ So you disappear as much as you can, you have fun, you take on these weird roles, you don’t give a shit, you enjoy yourself, you remember that you have a gorgeous group of friends, and your life is blessed and you do the best that you can.” 

With a jam-packed slate of new projects coming up, Jennifer Aniston is truly living her best, Dolly-esque life. And that’s that on that.

This article was originally published on Glamour US.