Jennifer Aniston Talks Britney Spears And ’90s Media Attention: ‘They Were Feeding On Young, Impressionable Girls… It’s Heartbreaking’

Jennifer Aniston discusses the pandemic, dealing with ’90s media attention and more in a new interview with InStyle.

The “Friends” star is asked about people saying the ’90s were the greatest because there wasn’t social media. However, as pointed out in the article, the likes of Britney Spears still weren’t treated well by the media.

Aniston shares, “[They were] feeding on young, impressionable girls. Half of these kids started on ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’.

“I was lucky enough to be raised by a very strict mother. The priorities were not about becoming a famous person. It was, ‘Study your craft, learn what you’re doing, don’t just go out there and get lucky.’

“I waitressed for years. I got a Bob’s Big Boy commercial on my 900th commercial audition. I was doing theatre on, like, Long Island.

“I think that [Spears’s] group of girls as teens didn’t have any kind of ‘Who am I?’ They were being defined by this outside source. The media took advantage of that, capitalized on them, and it ultimately cost them their sanity. It’s so heartbreaking.”

RELATED: Courteney Cox And Jennifer Aniston Pay Tribute To Lisa Kudrow On Her 58th Birthday

Aniston also talks about the upcoming second season of “The Morning Show”, saying of the press tour: “I call it the dog-and-pony show — travelling to do press junkets, red carpets, the shiny-penny things. Do people really need all that?

“The work is what I love to do. It’s the promotion of it that creates some stress in me. You get, like, a second of what it is that you’re promoting, and then the rest of it is salacious crap that you somehow got wrangled into talking about. There’s a big appetite for that — and listen, I get it. But if you don’t give it, then they make it up.”

RELATED: Jennifer Aniston Doppelgänger Goes Viral Thanks To Epic ‘Friends’ Impression

Aniston adds of how she’s reset over the COVID-19 pandemic: “My level of anxiety has gone down by eliminating the unnecessary sort of fat in life that I had thought was necessary. Also realizing that you can’t please everybody. And what good does that do if you’re just little bits of yourself?

“Let’s try to be the full all of who we are so we can come to the table. The way the media presents us folk in this business is like we’re always trotting around the world, on beaches having fun. But there are a lot of other, less obvious things that go into it.”

The interview will be featured in InStyle’s September issue hitting newsstands on August 20.

Next Slide