/ 4 April 2001

Aniston talks about life with Pitt

Los angeles – “The period after the wedding was extremely intense, for a lot of reasons,” she told the magazine, adding that her superstar husband was a “Taco Bell, Domino’s Pizza kind of guy.”

“This was the year where I took the deepest look inward that I ever had and asked a lot of questions for the first time. There’s been a real internal overhaul – about family, work, everything. Marriage brings up all the things I pushed to the back burner – the fears, the mistrust, the doubts, the insecurities … Every question comes out.”

Although she is a child of divorce (her parents split when she was 9 and she has at times been estranged from both of them) Aniston agreed to marry Pitt after only five months of going together. They moved into her house on their second date just after Pitt broke off his engagement to actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

“Gwyneth is a lovely person,” Aniston said. “But I didn’t worry about their past relationship, it was never something that was an interference. Once this began those previous relationships were done.”

Aniston and Pitt hit it off instantly, she said. “I felt we knew each other better than either of us had ever been known before.” And life together has been comfortable, even “boring”, she said, “sitting at home ordering take-out. It’s fun to be home. … He’s a Taco Bell, Domino’s Pizza type of guy.”

Pitt also wants a big family, she said. “I always thought two or three children, but Brad’s definitely seven. He loves the idea of a huge family.”

After the wedding, Aniston said she had a post-wedding crisis which included chopping off her long locks and going through an intense period of introspection. “Oddly enough we’ve had this healing process with each other, of deconstructing these ideals of ourselves to get rid of that piece of s- feeling we carry in ourselves,” she said.

“Getting the success – you feel, ‘Why me?’ I went through a period of guilt about my family: ‘Why are they struggling, and why did it work for me? I don’t deserve this! When are they going to find me out and call me on my bluff?”‘

Aniston said she has long suffered with low self-esteem partly due to negative messages from her mother, a former runway model, who raised Aniston after her father, actor John Aniston left, but who is currently estranged from her daughter and wasn’t invited to her June wedding.

“I never would have believed it, when I was 17, if you had told me that would happen,” Aniston said.

“I don’t feel beautiful all the time,” Aniston said, referring to her mother’s pressure to look perfect. “My mom would say, ‘Put your face on,’ and I would believe her,” she said, mimicking her mother’s instructions: “Your eyes are too close together, so when you put your eyeliner on you have to draw the lines up here because your eyes are already too small, and your face is too wide, and see, honey, you have your father’s mouth, so you’re going to have to draw lines around it.”

For years, she said, she was unable to show her face to anyone without lots of makeup.

Aniston, who will play Mark Wahlberg’s girlfriend in the upcoming movie Rock Star, said she hopes to demystify her fame for millions of girls who think they want to be like her with a new online chat site called JenXX where she will be candid about things like bad hair days.

The 32-old actress found fame from her co-starring role on NBC’s long-running situation comedy hit Friends, for which she currently earns some $750 000 per episode.