If you’ve ever creeped on an ex‘s social media, don’t worry: You’re in great company. Jennifer Aniston just did exactly that on April 5, when she surprisingly popped into her ex-boyfriend John Mayer‘s Instagram Live.
Here’s what happened: Mayer was filming his weekly IG Live show Current Mood on April 5, specifically discussing the recent passing of Bill Withers, the iconic singer behind hits like “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Mayer was friendly with Withers and joked that 100 percent of the things the icon said were useful while only 4 percent of what he (Mayer) says is useful. That’s when Aniston came in with a comment.
“For as long as I have been a fan of his or knew him personally, I never saw the man compromise on his principles. Ever,” Mayer said on his IG Live. “And that’s just more to take. That’s just more to take. Whether he was speaking to you or speaking to an interviewer 15 years ago, 14, 13 years ago, everything he said is useful. Four percent of the things that I say are useful. One hundred percent of the things he said were useful.”
To that last remark, Aniston replied with four laughing emojis, which, of course, the internet captured for eternity. See it for yourself, below.
Truly, is there anything more relatable than Jennifer Aniston watching John Mayer’s Instagram Live? (The couple dated from 2008 to 2009.) In this era of self-isolation and social distancing because of the coronavirus, people get bored. And what do you do when you’re bored? Insta-stalk your exes, obviously. Aniston really is just like us.
On her relationship with Mayer, Aniston told Vogue in December 2008, “He is a wonderful guy. We care about each other. It’s funny when you hit a place in a relationship and you both realize, We maybe need to do something else, but you still really, really love each other. It’s painful. There was no malicious intent. I deeply, deeply care about him; we talk, we adore one another. And that’s where it is.”
Across the world, people are expressing their gratitude to health care workers on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus, cheering from their balconies and porches and posting on social media—and Jennifer Aniston is no different.
The Friends star appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on April 2 (remotely, of course) to surprise a cardiovascular nurse from Utah, Kimball Fairbanks, who tested positive for COVID-19 and is currently in quarantine, away from her young daughters and unable to work. Fairbanks was chatting with Kimmel about how she’s feeling (her symptoms are on the mild side) and what work was like before she started feeling ill. He then told her he had a surprise for her. “We wanted to cheer you up a little bit. So I’d like you to meet somebody. Her name is Jennifer,” Kimmel said.
Enter Aniston, who brought a big smile to Fairbanks’s face. “Jen, I don’t know if you can see how much more excited Kimball was to see you than she was to see me,” the talk show host said. “It’s remarkable.”
“Hi, honey, it’s so good to meet you,” Aniston said. “I just have to say, God bless you and all of you that are out there doing what you’re doing. I just, I don’t even know how to express my gratitude to everything that you guys are doing, putting your health at risk and all of that. You’re just phenomenal.” They also surprised Fairbanks, who has been ordering in food while in isolation, with a $10,000 gift certificate for Postmates. Kimmel added that the delivery service would also be sending gift cards to all the nurses on her floor.
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Jennifer Aniston says she’s been home for three weeks. “The most challenging thing is watching news and trying to digest all that’s going on out there,” she said. “I allow a check-in in the morning, and then I’ll do a check-in in the evening, and that is it, because basically it’s regurgitating the exact same thing.” But like so many of us, she’s been doing a lot of cleaning, organizing, puzzles, and buying random stuff on Amazon. “Doing dishes is now my new favorite, favorite thing in the world, because not only are you doing your dishes but you’re washing your hands,” she said. “[And] organizing. I was a crazy person the first week and then I realized I had to pull back because I was going to run out of closets. [We’ve got] 30 more days. I’ve got to pace myself.”
Friends fanatics, I have a dream scenario for you: Imagine you’re visiting the set of Central Perk on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, and Jennifer Aniston pops up and surprises you. Well, this exact thing happened to a group of lucky fans this past week.
Here’s what happened: Aniston was guest-hosting The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which films on the same lot as Friends did, and decided to take a break and pop by her old stomping grounds. You see, fans can now actually tour the set of Central Perk, so Aniston decided to hide behind that iconic couch you know and love and give some visitors the scare of a lifetime. A good scare, obviously.
“The set is actually still here [on the Warner Bros. lot],” Aniston says in the clip. “It’s part of the Warner Bros. studio tour. So I thought, While I’m here, I’ll go take a visit.”
Watch the hilarious video for yourself, below. There is a lot of screaming involved.
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Don’t think this means a Friends reunion is happening soon, though. While Jennifer Aniston and several of the cast members have expressed interest in getting back together, nothing is on the books yet. A nonscripted reunion special was in the works at HBO Max (a new streaming service that will soon house all of Friends), but that’s been put on pause for now.
HBO Max chief creative officer Kevin Reilly told the Television Critics Association last week, per Deadline, “There is interest all around, and yet we can’t get the interests all alighted to push the button on it.” He said the reunion, for now, is “just a maybe.”
Hopefully something comes together. But if nothing happens, at least now we can hold on to the dream that one of the “friends” might surprise us on the Warner Bros. lot should we ever visit.
Backstage on the 19th, when they both accepted statutes at the SAG awards, a photographer captured an instantly-iconic photo of her hand, clasped under his. It looks, literally, like she is walking away from him, and like he is unable to let her go.
Cool, cool, cool, cool.
Mega-celebrities like Brad and Jen strike a strange deal with us, their public. We give them more money, value, and privilege of influence than anyone could ever need or want. In exchange, they entertain us—sometimes on screen, mostly in paparazzi shots and interviews and shady Instagram likes and breakdowns and addiction. Like the Greek gods were for mortals, they are our hotter, but similarly flawed, avatars. We project ourselves on them. We imagine ourselves on Brad and Jen’s last vacation as a couple. We take sides in the love triangle with Angelina. We find ourselves discussing Jen’s chances of having children as if we are her reproductive endocrinologist.
Pitt and Aniston were the golden couple. They were our royals in the long, dull interim between Princess Diana and Windsor-Sussexes. They were on top when Hollywood was still a country club that celebrated almost exclusively white people and white beauty, and they have maintained their footing even as much else has changed. We have lived in parallel with them, having children and heartbreak and successes and setbacks; they’ve stuck around with us as we exchanged the Hiltons for the Kardashians, and through six terms by four presidents. In the sprawling celebrity dollhouse that we all play in, they are Barbie and Ken.
Of course we want them to be together. It would mean that everything happens for a reason! It would mean that happy endings are real! It would mean Parent Trap was right and our divorced parents were wrong! It would mean that the Laws of Love are like the Laws of Energy: that the total amount of love in the universe remains constant over time, conserved in the hearts of people we thought had long ago moved on.
Wouldn’t it be cool if life was truly cyclical? Wouldn’t it be great if life, instead of culminating in death, culminated in sex with Brad Pitt?
That’s a good fantasy. But reality is actually better.
In reality, Jennifer Aniston is one of the most popular women in the world, and she does not need to get back together with the nice-but-slightly-greasy guy she broke up with 15 years ago. In reality, the only reason this pairing is still on the table is that despite being asked about Brad Pitt no matter what she does and where she goes, Jennifer Aniston has never said one bad word about him in public. (“That was really uncool” is the meanest thing Jennifer Aniston has ever said about Jolie and Pitt, referring to them giving interview after interview about falling in love during the first couple’s marriage.)
In reality, since his divorce and coming out with his addiction struggle, Aniston hasn’t tried to seduce him. She’s supported him with social invitations and public warmth. Even though it wasn’t exactly a loving compliment, she smiled encouragingly on Sunday night when Pitt gave his SAG acceptance speech, saying that he related to his character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “who gets high, takes his shirt off, and doesn’t get on with his wife.” When asked about him that same night, Aniston said, “We’ve all grown up together; we really have. And it just feels like a really fun night to celebrate and cheer each other on and keep working.”
Folks, these extremely rich, pretty people are just trying to not be awful to each other. Their relationship is probably less like a sweeping epic love story nearing its satisfying conclusion, and more like two old friends who have buried the memories of the tastes of each other’s mouths under deeper feelings of mutual respect and understanding. We need to let the dream go, not for their sakes—their agents are probably overjoyed by these headlines—but for our own. We need to accept that things end. Things change. That we shouldn’t get weekday wine drunk and text our exes, and then be like “oh my god how embarrassing that was for someone else,” and then be like “well ha ha how are you.” We need to accept that we will live and die without seeing these hot shiny-haired actors kissing on the mouths ever again.
We need to take what we’re given instead: a woman who is the physical embodiment of Thank U, Next. Look at Jennifer in that silk dress, laughing, extending her hand, walking away. Look at her not getting back together with her ex, even though he’s literally Brad Pitt. God forbid something happens, ‘least her career is a smash.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @JeanValjenny.
They’re the photos currently breaking the internet: Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pittreuniting backstage at the 2020 SAG Awards. Their interaction was brief but memorable. Pitt was already backstage, having just won the prize for Best Supporting Actor, and following closely behind him was Aniston for her Best Actress in a Drama Series win. Their photos together are so sweet—not romantic, to be clear, but rather two friends seemingly catching up and congratulating each other. That’s what I think, at least.
And it’s what the photographer who took the pics, Emma McIntyre, says happened. She gave some details about Pitt and Aniston’s well-documented run-in to People magazine, and it seems like it was good (platonic) vibes only.
“[They were both backstage] doing the circuit of awards press,” she tells the publication. “Jennifer had just signed some posters for SAG and was about to walk the press line. I was running back and forth between the two backstage areas and had just taken some photos of Jennifer. I was about to leave when I saw Brad coming down the hallway and sensed there would be a photo-worthy moment.”
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
She continues, “He called out ‘Aniston!’ and she turned around and they embraced and congratulated each other. It was a moment of two accomplished people at the top of their game, acknowledging each other’s successes and genuinely seeming happy to see one another…. The moment was really touching, and you could sense the respect between two people who have known each other 20-plus years and are both outstanding in their field.”
This is the kind of energy we all should have with our exes, TBH. Hopefully, people aren’t actually buying in to the idea Aniston and Pitt are getting back together. It’s beyond clear they’re just good friends who are happy to see the other one do well. Nothing more, nothing less.
In fact, Pitt said this himself when Entertainment Tonight asked him at the Golden Globes if he would mind running into Aniston. “I’ll run into Jen. She’s a good friend,” he said.
Meanwhile, Aniston said Pitt staying back to watch her acceptance speech at the SAGs was “sweet.”
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“We’ve all grown up together; we really have. And it just feels like a really fun night to celebrate and cheer each other on and keep working,” she told Extra TV.
On Sunday night (January 19), America got the reunion they’ve been waiting on for 15 years: Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt hugging and chatting at the SAG Awards, where both of them took home statues.
The internet, myself included, collectively lost its mind over the images of the former couple, whose marriage was a bastion of the early aughts. They broke up in 2005—and I will fully admit I still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news—and both went on to have very high-profile relationships, and in Pitt’s case multiple children with Angelina Jolie. But the nostalgia for their relationship has never truly died down, as evidenced by our reactions to seeing them together again.
In case you have somehow avoided the internet in the past 48 hours, here are the photos that sent us all into a tizzy.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
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By all accounts, Jen and Brad are friends, have been for years now, and are not getting back together. That, however, has not stopped all of us from projecting our feelings onto them and hoping for a reconciliation. I get it. It feels good, right? We long for a simpler time and perhaps a relationship from our own lives that we still hope might come back around again.
But this being 2020, people have gotten extremely extra with their theories—going so far as to surmise that the similarity of Jen and Brad’s current hair is a sign they’re getting back together. Seriously.
To be fair, the color is extremely similar—and excellent. Those highlights!
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And Brad has a long and storied history of styling his glorious head of hair in ways similar to that of his girlfriends. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Look at those matching arched bangs on Brad and ex-girlfriend Juliette Lewis in 1991.
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The Brad and Gwyneth years gave us this iconic hair moment at The Devil’s Own premiere in 1997.
Brad and Angelina Jolie had the long-hair ponytail thing going in 201.
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Is it an anecdotally-compelling case? Sure. But the truth is Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are probably never, ever getting back together. Like, ever. Meanwhile, we can all keep dreaming—and take their photos in as inspo for the next time we go to a hair colorist.
