Jennifer Aniston may have had a tumultuous 2005 in regards to both her personal and professional life, but the actor says she looks back on that time now as the beginning of a whole new chapter in her life.
Aniston stopped by the series finale of The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday where she discussed both the end of her marriage to Brad Pitt and the finale of Friends occurring back-to-back. When asked how she dealt with the hugely successful 10-season who coming to an end, she told DeGeneres with a laugh, “Well, I got a divorce and went into therapy. And then I did a movie called The Break-Up. I just kinda leaned into the end. I just was like, ‘You know what, guys? Let’s make this a completely new chapter. Let’s just end everything and start new.’ It worked great.”
After almost five years of marriage, Aniston and Pitt announced they were separating in January 2005, finalizing their divorce in October of that year. But there are definitely no hard feelings between the exes as Pitt attended her 50th birthday party in 2019, and Aniston even recently referred to him as one of her “buddies.” After the former couple did a live table reading together of Fast Times at Ridgemont High during the pandemic, Aniston told Howard Stern of the experience, “It was absolutely fun…we speak, and there’s no oddness at all, except for everyone that probably watched it and was wanting there to be, or assumed there to be. We had fun, and it was for a great cause, CORE,” Sean Penn‘s community relief nonprofit.
The Friends star also previously told Elle in January 2019 that her marriages to both Pitt and Justin Theroux, “have been very successful in [my] personal opinion.” She explained that, “when they came to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy, and sometimes happiness doesn’t exist within that arrangement anymore.” While Aniston admitted that, “there were bumps, and not every moment felt fantastic, obviously,” she added, “At the end of it, this is our one life and I would not stay in a situation out of fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of not being able to survive. To stay in a marriage based on fear feels like you’re doing your one life a disservice. When the work has been put in and it doesn’t seem that there’s an option of it working, that’s okay. That’s not a failure. We have these clichés around all of this that need to be reworked and retooled, you know? Because it’s very narrow-minded thinking.”
Aniston and Theroux dated for seven years before tying the knot, announcing their divorce in February 2018 after two and a half years of marriage. However, the pair have nothing but kind words for one another and, last April, Theroux confirmed that they even still regularly FaceTime and text.