Jennifer Aniston shared her candid thoughts about social media, with the actor revealing why she doesn’t enjoy using it.
The 53-year-old discussed her social media accounts during a recent interview with Allure for the cover of the magazine’s December issue. When Aniston first joined Instagram about three years ago, she notably received so many followers that the app ultimately crashed.
While her online presence sent shockwaves through the interent, she confessed that she actually “hates social media” and is “no good at” using it.
“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.”
She then shared why growing up without social media was ultimately beneficial for her.
“I’m really happy that we got to experience growing up, being a teenager, being in our 20s without this social media aspect,” the Friends star said. “Look, the internet, great intentions, right? Connect people socially, social networking. It goes back to how young girls feel about themselves, compare and despair.”
Aniston went on to reflect on how proud she is of herself today and how her future self is going to look back on this point of her life.
“I feel the best in who I am today, better than I ever did in my 20s or 30s even, or my mid-40s. We needed to stop saying bad shit to ourselves,” she said. “You’re going to be 65 one day and think, I looked f***ng great at 53.”
This wasn’t Aniston’s first time sharing her perspective about different online platforms. During a conversation with Sebastian Stan for Variety‘s “Actors on Actors”series in June, she shared how grateful she was that she started acting before social media became a thing.
“I always say I feel lucky that we got a little taste of the industry before it became what it is today, which is just different — more streaming services, more people. You’re famous from TikTok,” she explained. “You’re famous from YouTube. You’re famous from Instagram. It’s sort of almost like it’s diluting our actor’s job.
Elsewhere in her interview with Allure, Aniston revealed that she underwent in vitro fertilisation to get pregnant and opened up about the public’s obsession with her marriages as well as if she’d become a mother.
Although she didn’t mention him by name, she appeared to address speculation about her and Brad Pitt’s divorce in 2005, including the “narrative that [she] was just selfish” and “just cared about [her] career”. Aniston later married actor Justin Theroux in 2015, before announcing their split in 2017.
“And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child,” she said. “And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”
The Morning Show star also recalled the HuffPost essay she wrote in 2016 where she shut down down any rumours about being pregnant and called out the constant media scrutiny.
“I got so frustrated. Hence that op-ed I wrote,” she added. “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.’”
