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 On March 26, Reese Witherspoon was married to talent manager Jim Toth in a simple, elegant affair at her ranch in Ojai, California. Vogue’s Jonathan Van Meter spoke to the actress a few months before her wedding and discovered that, although the actress learned to ride an elephant for her role in the film, that’s nothing compared to balancing fame, love, and family. 
 
 Here she comes, waving like Miss America but looking like a blonde Audrey Hepburn. She is dressed in all black—leggings, cardigan, Wayfarers, and a kitten heel. The wave is hilariously exuberant, and even from a block away, as she strides purposefully toward me, I can see that the smile is comic: forced and way too big. And with that one winning gesture—a perfectly timed little burst of goofball—Reese Witherspoon signals that she is not only painfully aware that the sidewalk has suddenly become a runway lined with paparazzi yelling her name on an otherwise quiet Thursday afternoon in Santa Monica, but also that she is OK with it. Look at my weird life! she shouts without saying a word. 
 
 It’s a beautiful sunny day in early February, and we are meeting at the Blue Plate Oysterette, a hip little seafood joint not far from the Santa Monica Pier. Witherspoon, still at the curb, stares at the outside tables for a moment and then looks back at the photographers in the street still snapping away. She glances at the hostess, then at me, and finally says, with an ironic exclamation point, “How about inside!” 
 
 See a slideshow of Reese Witherspoon throughout the years in Vogue. 
 
 One of the things about being a polite Southern girl saddled with a cumbersome fame is that you are in constant negotiation with your surroundings. You know, more often than not, that your presence will tilt the delicate balance of the workaday world in your direction. And one thing that every good Southern girl knows is: Don’t make a scene. But that is exactly what happens everywhere Witherspoon goes. Indeed, just moments ago, people on this oceanside block were going about their noonday business: lunch, errands, sightseeing. And then—bam!—chaos. 
 
 As we take our seats, she shakes her head in weary bemusement and says, “Every dog has her fleas.” (Witherspoon’s essential Southernness frequently comes through in her language.) She takes a deep breath. “I wasn’t planning on drinking,” she says, “but now I am.” 
 
 Is that commotion an everyday occurrence? I ask. 
 
 “Lately,” she says. 
 
 All the wedding talk? (In case you haven’t heard, Witherspoon is engaged.) 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “It usually heats up during, like, pregnancies or babies or marriage. It’s the drama of real life. . . . It’s interesting to people. Readers want to know! I was talking to an actress the other day who is pregnant right now, and she was like, ‘What is it? What’s the deal?’ She said, ‘Oh, maybe once I have the baby no one will pay any attention,’ and I was like, ‘Bwah-ha-ha-ha!!!!’ ” She exaggeratedly tosses her head back. “ ‘Oh, yeah. They will leave you alone after you have the baby. Suuure. That’s exactly how it works.’ ” 
 
 See a slideshow of brides who wore unconventional wedding dresses here. 
 
 But then, perhaps not wanting to sound ungracious, she puts a different spin on it. “I get hugged a lot,” she says. “Which is fun. Mostly it’s all good, positive energy that comes to me. I like people. And at the end of the day, we’re all just people, you know? We’re all just going through it. Nobody’s life experience is all that much different than anyone else’s. We’ve all had our share of heartbreak. It’s the universal language of life.” 
 
 I can’t help looking down at the four-carat rock sitting high on her hand, a ring proffered a few months earlier by the handsome 40-year-old CAA agent Jim Toth, whom she’s been dating for a little over a year. What’s he like? I ask. “He’s wonderful,” she says, beaming. “He’s just a really great guy, and I feel really lucky. It’s so cute: Over the holidays I was at a department store in L.A. with my friends, and these three women from Oklahoma came up to me, and they said”—she lays on a thick Southern drawl—“ ‘Reese. We are so happy for yeeew. We liiike this guy for yeeew.’ And I said, ‘You do?!’ ‘Yes, ma’am. We think he is a niiice man. We think he is going to treat you well and be good to yeeew.’ I was like, ‘Really?’ So sweet! And I told them my mother likes him very much, too.” 
 
 I had been hearing from people who work with Witherspoon that she is in, as they say, “a good place.” When I mention these reports, she looks at me with one of those faces she is famous for, a look that telegraphs surprise tinged with irritation. “I mean . . . it sort of indicates that at other times I was not in a good place.” She laughs. “Which is true. I have had my share of heartbreak. But I think your friends really know when you are at your happiest. Even though I am nervous and excited and all those things people feel when they are about to get married, I think I am mostly very calm right now. Usually, I’m a little bit of a squirrel. I have a squirrelly energy.” 
 
 Squirrelly? 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “Like, you don’t know where your next nut is gonna come from?” She stares at me with those unblinking blue eyes. “At the moment I am not buzzing around all squirrelly and nervous. I just feel really lucky to be with someone who cares so much and is so kind and loving. You know? It’s a really nice thing to finally have that.” 
 
 Click here for a slideshow of Reese Witherspoon's best red carpet moments. 
 
 
 
 Witherspoon may be settling down in her personal life, but she’s taking more risks than ever in the roles she chooses. Despite having recently said, “There’s not a part for a 34-year-old woman in a robot movie” (implying she would never want or be able to carry an action flick), she will later this year star in This Means War, one of those new era–Hollywood hybrids (action-adventure/romantic comedy, anyone?). The director, McG, describes it as both “my answer to Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Ocean’s Eleven” and “my ode to Billy Wilder.” Witherspoon plays a busy working girl who is unlucky in love but suddenly finds herself with a glamorous problem: Two spies—one American, one British (played by new era–Hollywood hotties Chris Pine and Tom Hardy)—start using every weapon in their arsenals to woo her. 
 
 “It was new for her to be suspended in a rig hanging upside down in a Jeep from a building,” says McG. “But it’s just mind-scrambling to work with her in terms of her comedic timing, her sense of what matters, her inherent ability to be lit from within.” McG also hopes to show audiences a different side of her. “I think you are going to see a sexy Reese Witherspoon the likes of which you have never seen. That was a challenge that I set out for her at the beginning of the process. I said, ‘Men like you, but men don’t covet you the way that I think they can.’ ” 
 
 It’s anybody’s guess whether this film will be watchable or whether Witherspoon will work in it or not. It wasn’t that long ago when it seemed Witherspoon could do no wrong. As the nineties came to an end, she began delivering in one smart comedy after another: Cruel Intentions, Election, and the two Legally Blonde films, the Elle Woods franchise that put her newly formed production company, Type A Films, on the map and also gave her some real power in Hollywood. By the time she won the Oscar for Best Actress in Walk the Line, in 2005, she had taken on an air of invincibility. Was there anything this girl couldn’t do? Turns out the answer is yes. She has lately been miscast a few times, most egregiously as a pro softball player past her prime in James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know. (As one big Hollywood producer said to me, “What woman identifies with a person who has no interest in falling in love? Who is that supposed to be?”) 
 
 It’s far less of a stretch to imagine Witherspoon as the scrappy ingenue who will do whatever it takes to survive in the Depression-era circus world of her latest film, Water for Elephants, based on the best-selling novel and directed by Francis Lawrence. That role is the reason, a couple of days before our lunch, I find myself inside a giant circus tent pitched in a dusty lot near the train tracks in Riverside, California. Witherspoon appears in front of me and asks, “Wanna see something?” She leads me over to one of her costars, Tai, the 42-year-old elephant she spent six months with last summer, and coos, “Hiiii, laaaady,” and then runs a hand down her trunk. “I love that her trunk is both her nose and her hand,” says Witherspoon as the 9,000-pound creature begins sniffing around to see what sort of treat is in the offing. “She has this incredible dexterity; she can pick up a log, but she can also pick up something this tiny.” Witherspoon holds up one blue peanut M&M and then flattens out her palm, and Tai gently plucks it from her hand and puts it in her mouth. 
 
 Set in the early thirties, the story follows a young Ivy League veterinary student played by Robert Pattinson, who, left with nothing after his parents die in a car accident, joins the circus, where he falls in love with Witherspoon’s character, Marlena. Marlena is not only the star of the circus, whose act with four horses and then an elephant is the show’s big attraction; she is also married to the charismatic, controlling ringmaster, played with sinister menace by Christoph Waltz. 
 
 Witherspoon has made more than a few films where she has had to train for months to learn an entirely new skill set before a single frame was shot: most famously learning to sing like June Carter Cash in Walk the Line. Now the circus. “About three months before the movie started, I went to circus school,” she says, “doing trapeze and acrobatics with Cirque du Soleil performers. A lot of it is flexibility and learning to bend your body backward. I had been a gymnast when I was little, so getting that flexibility back was really fun.” Then she went to a ranch to train with Tai; she was slightly nervous the first day. “She could crush you with her jaw, but she knows the exact right amount of pressure with which to pick you up but not hurt you. It’s really incredible. I trust her more than any other animal I have ever been around.” 
 
 Interestingly, the elephant in the room turned out to be the least of anyone’s troubles. (As Pattinson puts it, “She was the most consistently professional creature I have ever worked with.”) It was the horses—two white Andalusians and two black Friesians—that turned out to be high-strung and unpredictable. “Reese grew up around horses,” says Lawrence, “and she owns a couple that she rides now, and even she was scared of them.” Says Witherspoon: “I’ve always been a little bit of a tomboy that way, so I just always enjoy the thrill of doing something dangerous.” 
 
 She got more than she wished for. Not only did she get thrown from a horse one day, Pattinson tells a story about shooting a scene in which one of the horses is lying down in a train car with Witherspoon curled up on the ground next to it when suddenly the horse jumped to its feet and stepped on her leg. “I could see in Reese’s face that it must have hurt more than anything, and she played it off like it was absolutely nothing,” says Pattinson. “And then the next day she had this enormous bruise. It could have quite easily broken her leg, but she didn’t mention it to anybody. She is just incredibly brave that way.” 
 
 Witherspoon’s toughness was one of the main reasons Lawrence cast her in the film. “What I liked is that there’s that determination, but there’s also a sense of humor and a sense of vulnerability. It must come from her family and upbringing. You sort of feel like if she sets her mind to something, it’s going to happen—nothing is going to get in her way. And that’s part of what keeps her interesting—and oddly a little dangerous.” 
 
 Pattinson, too, thinks there’s more to Witherspoon than meets the eye. “In terms of public perception, she’s thought of as America’s Sweetheart. And she kind of is in a lot of ways. But I think that she’s a lot bawdier than that, a lot more raucous. It did actually shock me to see that. She’s tough. You wouldn’t want to get into an argument with her at all.” He laughs. 
 
 “You can always tell that she will be incredibly nice to anyone who’s not an idiot, but it’s always very clear that there’s a line you really shouldn’t cross.” (When I tell Witherspoon that Pattinson said this, her response is classic Reese: “Oh, yeah. I’m a little junkyard dog.”) 
 
 If only she had brought some of that edgy danger to her performance. Although her scenes in the ring with the horses and the elephant are breathtaking, not least of all because you know that she is doing all of the stunts herself, and she looks fantastic in 1930s cut-on-the-bias evening gowns (and even committed to dyeing her hair platinum for the movie), it unfortunately feels like she’s holding back in some way. Perhaps it was hard to compete with the director’s overheated take on an already melodramatic story, in which terrible things happen to everyone, animals and humans alike. A feel-good movie this is not. 
 
 But whatever the critical response will be, Witherspoon seems grateful for the experience: “I spent six months of my life last year with an elephant. Every day! Are you kidding me? And in leotards with sparkles all over them. I mean, come on! That’s like a little girl’s fantasy.” 
 
 
 
 Two weeks after our lunch in Santa Monica, the day after the Oscars, Witherspoon calls me on the phone. She has just picked up her kids—Ava, eleven, and Deacon, seven—from some after-school activity, and she sounds a bit harried. 
 
 “What is that?” she says to her dog, annoyed. “Don’t eat that.” 
 
 Now that the Oscars are over, she has a couple months off—or “in town,” as she puts it. “You know, it can be a crazy life. Sometimes you feel like you are on a speeding train and you just don’t know where it’s going. You can start to lose your identity and what it is that you are really working for.” Like a lot of working women, she’s constantly looking for the right balance. “I don’t wake up to make movies. I wake up to have a wonderful family and to cultivate the best life for all of us, and it’s great to now have a partner in that. We have a lot of family meetings. ‘Mom’s going to be away and coming home on the weekends. How does everybody feel about that?’ It’s always military operations around here. Lots of different moving parts. I have my moments when I feel like I’m just going to collapse and I can’t do it anymore and I’m failing at everything. Like, you’re kind of good at a bunch of stuff but not really good at anything.” 
 
 Witherspoon, who turned 35 in March, seems acutely aware that she is on the cusp of an entirely new stage in her life. “I am really going through that right now. I’ve had some really kind of sad moments lately. You don’t go backward! And I think 35 for a woman is a big thing. I remember when I was a little girl looking up at my mother at 35 doing her hair in the mirror, and I thought, my mother has never been more beautiful. She had years of wisdom you can’t erase. And now I feel the same way when I look in the mirror. You can’t pretend you are an ingenue. You can’t pretend you are wide-eyed and innocent. It’s on your face! It’s in your body. It’s in your voice. It’s in your reactions to things when people say, ‘I just did the most morally corrupt thing I’ve done in my life’ and you literally don’t blink.” She laughs. “You’ve either done it yourself or you know someone who has.” 
 
 Having a preteen daughter has also made her see herself in a new light. “There’s a shift in your womanhood. That’s the little girl, and I am the woman. There’s a big difference. She’s on the precipice of having her love affairs and her life.” 
 
 I ask her what Ava is like. “She is curious and artistic and very smart,” she says. “She really surprises me. I know it’s corny, but being a parent to me is such a great privilege; that I get to chaperone these beautiful little souls through life. They astound me with their knowledge and their humor. Parenthood is not at all what I expected it to be. I thought you make little people in your image. But they are just nothing like me or their father [her ex-husband, Ryan Phillippe]. They are their own individuals.” 
 
 Because I first met Witherspoon eight years ago, when I interviewed her for this magazine, I ask her, What does 34 know that 26 didn’t? “I definitely know now that I know nothing,” she says. “When I was 26 I would have told you a lot of things that I thought I knew really, really well,” she says. “I was a little more shut down in my 20s. I was really scared of a lot of things and a lot of people. I have gone through so many changes since then. Obviously, being divorced and having a couple of relationships. I’m much more open than I was. I think with life experience you go: I have no idea what’s next. The unexpected doesn’t surprise me anymore. It really shocked me then.” 
 
 Would you say you were blindsided by things? 
 
 “Yeah,” she says. “Really blindsided. I was always shocked about finding out things or behavior or people’s attitudes toward things. You just realize that you don’t know anything about love or relationships.” 
 
 It is different interviewing Witherspoon now. For one thing, we are comfortably hanging out for a couple of hours in a restaurant shooting the breeze and drinking wine; eight years ago we sat in facing chairs with a coffee table between us at her production-company office, and she was all business—I felt as if I were in a job interview. Today she is sweet, relaxed, and full of thoughtful questions; but she is also a very sharp and funny lunch companion, and some of her retorts have real teeth. For example, if you don’t talk as rat-a-tat fast as she does, she has a habit of finishing your sentences for you, but with her own particular take on things. At one point we were talking about fashion, and I said, “People who love fashion often . . .” 
 
 “ . . . Lack perspective?” she said with a comically judgmental look on her face. 
 
 But one thing that hasn’t changed is that she is as private as ever. Indeed, she seems almost constitutionally unsuited for the level of fame she has to live with. At one point, I ask her what is the worst thing about being Reese Witherspoon, and she pauses for a very long time. Finally she says, “I mean, I feel like an ingrate for even thinking anything isn’t good. I’m very, very, very lucky. But . . . umm . . . probably that I parted with my privacy a long time ago. We went different ways. And sometimes I mourn it. Sometimes I will sit in the car and cry. Because I can’t get out. That’s the only thing: I mourn the loss of my privacy.” 
 
 More than most people in her position during this era of constant self-revelation, Witherspoon has nonetheless managed to maintain a modicum of privacy. “I have to say, I have been through a few life experiences that have just made me feel really good about my friends because the truth never came out about certain things. And that made me feel like I have confidantes in them. I mean, look: I don’t have that many friends. I have a few really amazing friends whom I consider family. But it means a lot to me that I have that, because so much of my life belongs to other people. Everyone always laughs about it and goes, ‘Boy, they got that wrong!’ It makes me feel like, Wow, maybe there’s something that’s still my own.” 
 
 This is one of the strange conundrums of being Reese, the polite Southern girl with the cumbersome fame. She did not know she was parting with her privacy until the train had already left the station. “I just think you never think you are ever going to get to any level where it’s going to happen to you. I mean, that would be extreme hubris.” 
 
 Do you ever regret becoming an actor? 
 
 “Noooo!” she says, as if I had just asked her if she wishes she had married her high school sweetheart and stayed in Nashville. “With whatever I’ve lost, I’ve gained tenfold in life experience. I have an interesting life.” 
 
 
 
 At our lunch a few weeks earlier, Witherspoon mentions that she and Nora Ephron are developing a film together about the singer Peggy Lee. (This explains why Witherspoon was humming standards under her breath to Tai at the photo shoot.) Lee, who grew up in North Dakota and who’s best known for her inimitable cover of the Little Willie John hit “Fever,” was one of the most influential jazz vocalists of all time, with a career that lasted six decades (she died in 2002). Ephron is writing and directing; Witherspoon will star. When I ask her how she feels about making another biopic about another American singer-songwriter from the heartland, she says, “When Nora and I began talking about Peggy Lee, it was really exciting because Nora has this unbridled enthusiasm for that era and that music. She knows every lyric to every song. So yeah, I am excited to revisit that.” Has she herself ever considered singing as a career? “I am not going to cut an album,” she says. “I’m not going to suddenly have a pop record on the charts.” She laughs. “But if I was going to do it, it would be country, because I like country music a lot.” 
 
 I tell her that Ephron once sat me down when I was going through a difficult time and gave me some very frank advice that I have been following ever since. “I had a moment like that with Nora, too,” she says. “She really helped me through a hard time. It was like having the best girlfriend ever. She makes you laugh and she makes you think. I feel very lucky for her friendship.” 
 
 When I call Ephron to talk about Witherspoon she says, “She’s a really smart, really charming, dear, dear person. Everyone loves her. And lovely on the set, and she basically kills herself. I mean, you know, she took softball lessons for a year!” She laughs. “And she went through that divorce in a kind of . . . you would call it a textbook way, if anyone had written a textbook about how to do it. I have never seen anybody handle a breakup as brilliantly as she did. She didn’t pretend to the people who knew her that it was anything but difficult and painful, but she was completely private. She made herself the winner of a situation that had been very difficult without suddenly appearing with a completely new look or dating someone wildly inappropriate in order to prove that she was fine. She lived her life in some dignified way, and it worked! I am just an enormous admirer of the way she handled that experience.” 
 
 What made you think of her for Peggy Lee? “Just for fun, just to make myself feel really bad, I watched Walk the Line again, and it’s such an amazing movie. And she is so brilliant in it. She just disappeared inside that character without losing her Reese-iness, which we love. But she is June Carter Cash forevermore. It’s an astonishing performance. So that’s one of the things that I’m excited about; she is going to do the same thing with Peggy Lee. What I really believe about her is that her great gift is for character acting. She can really transform herself. That performance in Election is just spectacular.” 
 
 
 
 Tracy Flick, the character from Election who will stop at nothing to win, is one of the great gifts of modern cinema. Indeed, it is now a noun, a type of person, like saying “She is an Eve Harrington.” When I ask Witherspoon about it, she says, “I think what’s flattering about it is that I created a character that never existed within the Zeitgeist before. She became a point of reference to people that seems very individual and very singular. It’s like one of those characters, like Chauncy Gardiner, whom you don’t know how to describe any other way. They are just very . . . Tracy Flick! I don’t think people think I am Tracy Flick. Not at all.” 
 
 Hmm. Not so fast. Tracy Flick is nothing if not a determined little junkyard dog, a squirrelly Type A trying to figure out where her next nut is going to come from. As our phone call winds down, I ask Witherspoon about her own politics. “Well, I don’t really get into that stuff,” she says. “Everybody has their own choice, their political opinions. I don’t think it’s my place when talking to Vogue about movies that I’m making to use that opportunity to promote my political ideas. Not my cup of tea. It’s sort of private. I was raised Southern, you know? It wasn’t like you were told to talk about religion and politics at a dinner party. And don’t get me wrong: I definitely have a lot of opinions. I am not opinion-free. But there’s a time and a place for everything. But maybe I will change my mind! Look, if I wanted to run for office, I would. If I want to espouse my political opinions, I will run for office.” She laughs. “And that’s a possibility!” ||||| To reach Jennifer Aniston, you have to drive up and up and up, then announce yourself at a white gate that opens onto a field of gray pebbles sprouting symmetrical trees. A procession of stone slabs leads like a bridge to the massive bronze doors on an otherwise solid white facade. Aniston answers, casual in jeans and a black T-shirt. She’s disarmingly friendly. She thinks she knows another person with my name. She asks about the traffic. She leads me to her beautiful family room and kitchen, with its built-in pizza oven and glass-encased wine room, and offers to make us peppermint tea. She apologizes in advance for the texts she might get from her showrunner, because she’s a month away from shooting her upcoming show with Reese Witherspoon. While she brews the tea, I plop my bag on the counter, like we’re just hanging out. I tell her my daughter drained my phone battery right before I left the house, and so we start chatting about kids and phones. How badly they want them. When they should be allowed to have them. Do you let them feel left out, or “Do you try to save their sanity by not letting them grow up inside a teeny computer? It’s a real internal conflict,” she says, carrying the mugs to the sofa. “So much is out there.” This is true. She would know. 
 
 Aniston spent a decade on Friends and has starred in more than 30 movies, but the role that sticks to her most tenaciously is America’s Suffering Sweetheart. Cast as the eternal ingenue in the never-ending marriage plot, her joys, heartbreaks, and 57,000 fictional pregnancies have kept the lights on at several tabloids for a quarter of a century. I know this character is a fiction, but she’s still an undeniable presence—a third person in the room, lounging in the hanging chair, eating perfectly cut crudités. “We live in a society that messages women: By this age, you should be married; by this age, you should have children,” Aniston says. “That’s a fairy tale. That’s the mold we’re slowly trying to break out of.” 
 
 “It is a grand mystery why the public obsession [with Aniston] has never abated.” 
 
 “It is a grand mystery why the public obsession has never abated,” says Kristin Hahn, her producing partner and one of her best friends. “I’ve wondered about it myself for many years—I think Jen represents an archetype for us as a culture.” Aniston is the screen onto which America projects all its double standards about women, especially successful ones. We first got to know her as Rachel Green, the runaway bride who moved to New York City to become herself. Then we spent a decade emotionally invested in whether she would end up with Ross, only to have her perfect marriage to Brad Pitt end soon after that. It’s obviously a lucrative projection, or it would not have been bought and sold, year after year. What anyone gets out of it is unclear. “Maybe it has everything to do with what they’re lacking in their own life,” Aniston theorizes. Or maybe using marriage and children as the ultimate marker of female happiness is just another way to disempower successful women. “Why do we want a happy ending? How about just a happy existence? A happy process? We’re all in process constantly,” Aniston says. “What quantifies happiness in someone’s life isn’t the ideal that was created in the ’50s. It’s not like you hear that narrative about any men.” Men, of course, are allowed to continue merrily on their open-ended path to adventure. “That’s part of sexism—it’s always the woman who’s scorned and heartbroken and a spinster. It’s never the opposite. The unfortunate thing is, a lot of it comes from women,” she says. “Maybe those are women who haven’t figured out that they have the power, that they have the ability to achieve a sense of inner happiness.” 
 
 Leather dress, Alexandre Vauthier, $4,520. Photographed by Zoey Grossman and Styled by Alison Edmond 
 
 The thing that's surprisingly easy to forget about Aniston is just how powerful she is, because the amount of power she wields is at odds with her lovable image. It’s a soft, persuasive power, the kind that gets you on her side. It’s not only that she’s remarkably nice and easy to relate to, it’s that she’s smart, careful, deliberate, precise—both as a person and an actor. Anne Fletcher, who directed Aniston in her new Netflix movie, Dumplin’, says she’d be watching Aniston work and would notice a small, almost imperceptible hand gesture and think, “That’s [her character] Rosie. That’s not Jen. That is completely Rosie.” At a point when most successful actresses begin to wind down (not always by choice), Aniston shows no sign of slowing. In 2017, at the age of 48, she was ranked second on Forbes’s list of highest-paid actresses, and she makes millions a year in product endorsements. She’s about to start filming her new TV show, a dramedy about morning-news-show anchors, costarring Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, which was acquired by Apple in a bidding war. And soon she’ll appear in two more Netflix productions: Murder Mystery, with Adam Sandler, about a vacationing New York couple who become suspects in an elderly billionaire’s murder; and First Ladies, with Tig Notaro, about the first lesbian president of the United States. 
 
 Dumplin’, out now, was adapted by Hahn from a book by Julie Murphy. It is, among other things, a tribute to Dolly Parton. The filmmakers asked Parton to license her songs for the movie and write an original composition for the soundtrack. She and her collaborator, 4 Non Blondes’ Linda Perry, wound up writing six. Aniston, a lifelong Parton fan who’d named one of her dogs, yes, Dolly Parton, says that working with the legend was a thrill. During their first meeting, a dinner at Aniston’s house, Parton remembers asking, “Do you still have Dolly Parton? Can I meet her? I’ve always wanted to meet Dolly Parton.” (They met.) Later, when Aniston went to Perry’s studio to listen to the soundtrack, Parton says that “[Aniston] would listen to the song, and she would just cry and cry. You’ve got to be really sensitive for things to touch you like that.” 
 
 Tom Ford tank, $2,150, and Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses, $850 Photographed by Zoey Grossman and Styled by Alison Edmond 
 
 In Dumplin’, Aniston plays Rosie, a former pageant queen who now runs her small town’s teen beauty pageant. She is the single mother of a daughter, Willowdean (Danielle Macdonald of Patti Cake$), or Will, whom she calls Dumplin’. Will is overweight and resents that her mom seems to care more for the pageant girls than she does for her, so she signs up to compete. What starts out as a protest turns into a celebration of friendship and inclusivity. It’s a message that’s close to Aniston’s heart, because she is a girl’s girl and a friend person. Aniston and Hahn first met at a barbecue in Laurel Canyon when they were 19, when Aniston still lived in New York. “Jen was visiting her dad, and she came over. I remember it vividly, just turning around and seeing her and feeling like she was a long-lost sister of some kind, and not wanting her to leave. We just embraced her and we all became each other’s family and really helped each other. The show Friends was definitely kind of a parallel reality to our real lives.” 
 
 Hahn describes Aniston as their friend group’s “social glue.” “When she’s not in town, we almost don’t know what to do with ourselves,” she says. When I tell Aniston about this later, she laughs. “They don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to eat. They don’t know how to socialize,” Aniston says. It’s been this way since they were in their twenties. “My house was always like the clubhouse. I love entertaining. I always have food. I think I probably got that from my mom, who always had her girlfriends over. I picked it up from my childhood—just always hearing girls in the house and learning how to make a good cheese board.” 
 
 "It’s the only place to point a finger at me as though it’s my damage—like it’s some sort of a scarlet letter on me that I haven’t yet procreated, or maybe won’t ever procreate." 
 
 Aniston, whose parents divorced when she was young, says of her friends, “We always joke that we raised each other, we mothered each other, we sistered each other, we’ve been kids to each other.” She made her own family her own way. “I also was never a kid who sat around and dreamed about a wedding, you know? Those were never my fantasies. When I was first popped the question, it was so foreign to me.” That childhood environment, which she escaped through movies and TV and dreams of being an actress, led to her career. “My priorities weren’t about finding partnership and who am I gonna marry and what am I gonna wear on my wedding day. I was building houses with shoe boxes and toilet paper and felt. It was always about finding a home that felt safe. And I’m sure, because I was from a divorced-parent home, that was another reason I wasn’t like, ‘Well, that looks like a great institution.’ ” 
 
 Which is partly why the obsession with her love life rankles. “I don’t feel a void. I really don’t. My marriages, they’ve been very successful, in [my] personal opinion. And when they came to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy, and sometimes happiness didn’t exist within that arrangement anymore. Sure, there were bumps, and not every moment felt fantastic, obviously, but 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.” By endlessly focusing on her marital or family status, “you’re diminishing everything I have succeeded at, and that I have built and created,” she says. “It’s such a shallow lens that people look through. It’s the only place to point a finger at me as though it’s my damage—like it’s some sort of a scarlet letter on me that I haven’t yet procreated, or maybe won’t ever procreate.” Ultimately, she says, the idea of a happy ending is “a very romantic idea. It’s a very storybook idea. I understand it, and I think for some people it does work. And it’s powerful and it’s incredible and it’s admirable. Even enviable. But everybody’s path is different.” 
 
 Aniston has wanted to do a movie about the relationship between mothers and daughters for a long time. Part of what drew her to Dumplin’ was the way it echoed her own “challenging upbringing,” as she puts it. Aniston’s father, John, is a soap opera actor; he’s still on Days of Our Lives. Her mother, Nancy Dow, was a model and actress. Aniston came home one day when she was nine to the news that her father had moved out. She didn’t see him for a year. Her mother was often critical and was very focused on looks. “She was from this world of, ‘Honey, take better care of yourself,’ or ‘Honey, put your face on,’ or all of those odd sound bites that I can remember from my childhood.” 
 
 Aniston and her mom were famously estranged for years. “My mom said those things because she really loved me. It wasn’t her trying to be a bitch or knowing she would be making some deep wounds that I would then spend a lot of money to undo. She did it because that was what she grew up with. ‘You want to be happy. It’s hard for big girls.’ She was missing what was [actually] important. I think she was just holding on and doing the best she could, struggling financially and dealing with a husband who was no longer there. Being a single mom in the ’80s I’m sure was pretty crappy.” 
 
 Python-printed leather dress, Gucci. White gold and diamond ring, Cartier. Beauty Tip: Achieve Jennifer’s lit-from-within luminosity with Aveeno Positively Radiant Maxglow Infusion Drops ($24). Photographed by Zoey Grossman and Styled by Alison Edmond 
 
 Still, over time, Aniston has come to regard narrow beauty standards as a kind of prison. “We have to redefine what that is. It’s slowly been happening, but there’s still that mentality out there that wants to pit women against each other.” It’s the same thing, she feels, with social media. “I sound like a broken record, but it’s hard enough to just get out there as a kid, let alone ask for or seek out judgment.” Which is why she stays away. For someone as ubiquitous and relatable as Aniston, she is completely inaccessible by today’s standards. “The one thing I have is maintaining this little circle of sanctity that’s my own. If I’m sitting here posting something about my dogs or I’m Boomeranging my coffee mug in the morning, that’s just giving away one more piece of something that is mine.” 
 
 She’s purposefully protective of her private life, she says. “Look, I also don’t want to become.... There are times when I’ve found myself becoming a little too isolated. I don’t want to become that person, either. I don’t want to lose touch with what’s out in the world.” Not long ago, she was doing research for her show about morning-news anchors, and she went on YouTube. She was watching clips of different newscasters, and suddenly an old Diane Sawyer interview of her popped up. “And I clicked on it, and I just sat there riveted, only because I realized, Oh my God, I was really vulnerable! Somehow, along the way, I calloused up.” 
 
 The interview she’s talking about is from 2004, toward the end of Friends, right around the time the paparazzi started getting ferocious. Her own openness shocked her. “It’s just self-preservation. Because that was also a time, I think, when the internet was really taking off. The tabloids started painting me in a light that wasn’t true to who I was. Then I just was like, Shut up and say nothing, because there’s nothing you can do. You can try to protest too much—No, I’m not unhappy! No, I’m not this! I’m not that. I finally was like, I’m done. I’m going to shut the doors. I’m going to tune it out. If somebody tries to talk to me, I’ll give one-word answers, and I will not be vulnerable. I’m way too sensitive to be misinterpreted, misconstrued, or taken out of context. I just started to shut down.” 
 
 It occurs to her that this may be one of the reasons why she started to branch out and do more characters that she could just disappear into. “Because I didn’t want to just be that person in the tabloids. I also had to prove it to myself. I’m not just that, right?” she says. “Look, we’re all human at the end of the day. I’m really still working on it. That’s just my own PTSD of being...how do I say this...it’s getting easy to maneuver around the city. It’s a matter of choosing when I feel like I’m okay with having a bunch of people take a bunch of pictures of me.” 
 
 After a while, Aniston shows me around her beautiful house, which she gut-renovated with her now ex, Justin Theroux. The couple’s separation was announced in February; that same month, the house was featured in Architectural Digest. Aside from some editing of the family-room picture wall, not much seems to have changed. The space is at once cozy and dramatic, full of dark leather and wood, furry pillows. 
 
 "I don’t feel a void. I really don’t. My marriages, they’ve been very successful, in [my] personal opinion." 
 
 It feels intimate on a grand scale, or maybe it’s the other way around. “It’s a big house,” she says, “but it also has big rooms.” They hold a lot of people. She does plan to redo the dining room, “but that’s because I can never not do something,” she says. She’s still building and rebuilding her dream house, only not with shoe boxes anymore. We go out on the terrace, and she shows me the pool below. “This is where, every Sunday, we do ‘Sunday Fundays,’ as we call it, where [my friends’] kids come and we huddle around down there and they jump around in the pool.” 
 
 “I marvel at how she has remained as grounded as a person could possibly be in that situation, and also at the fact that she worked hard at nurturing the friendships that she always had while she had this big life, this big career,” says Hahn, a frequent Sunday Funday guest. “She’s always stayed so humble, and I’m not just saying that. She’s been able to stay connected to people who don’t have the same financial reality or work reality. She does live in a rarefied world, but she’s not a rarefied person.” 
 
 Sweaterdress, $3,920, Swarovski crystal earrings, $500, all, Isabel Marant. Leather and diamond fringe boots, Each Other, $865. Photographed by Zoey Grossman and Styled by Alison Edmond; Hair by Chris McMillan at Starworks Artists; makeup by Gucci ﻿Westman for Westman Atelier; manicure by Miwa Kobayashi; produced by ﻿Michelle Hynek at Crawford & Co Productions. Architecture by Robert Stone. 
 
 As for whether she’ll have her own children, Aniston is still uncertain. She admits the prospect always felt “quite honestly, kind of frightening.” She continues, “Some people are just built to be wives and have babies. I don’t know how naturally that comes to me.” But as in many aspects of her life, she’s still open to other possibilities. “Who knows what the future holds in terms of a child and a partnership— how that child comes in...or doesn’t? And now with science and miracles, we can do things at different times than we used to be able to.” 
 
 Aniston attributes this flexibility to her sense of inner contentment, disconnected from career success. “I’ve always been predominantly a happy person,” Aniston says. “Especially once I got out of my [mother’s] house. Not that it was horrible and unpleasant, but it had its challenges. I found myself as happy when I was waitressing at Jackson Hole as I feel now. I think that’s also a survival technique from coming from a home that wasn’t always that way. I have chosen to use what I grew up with as an example of what I do not want to be or live in. It’s a glass-half-full kind of thing. Always being open. Allowing myself to feel what I feel. What brings me happiness? I have a great job. I have a great family. I have great friends. I have no reason to feel otherwise. If I did, I would need to go get an attitude shift, a perspective shift.” The sun is setting, and it takes her by surprise. “What the hell, we’re having a beautiful sunset!” 
 
 This article originally appeared in the January 2019 issue of ELLE. 
 
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 Brad Pitt opens up about family and finding time for what's important in life in this Sunday’s PARADE with Dotson Rader. The 47-year-old star shares his thoughts on Angie, the kids, his private pain, and what he lives for now.Be sure to check out this weekend's issue of PARADE magazine in your local newspaper for the full interview with Brad Pitt.“I put much more emphasis on being a satisfied man. I’m satisfied with making true choices and finding the woman I love, Angie, and building a family that I love so much. A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss. … That’s the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.”“I spent the ‘90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to actress Jennifer Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t."“One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. She is such a great mom. Oh, man, I’m so happy to have her.”"I was surprised at how automatic it is, how much of it is instinctual. And now I have a great confidence and trust in those instincts. I mean, one sound at night and you’re awake and up because they may need you. Or when they start to have a tantrum, you know to divert them from spinning out by helping them focus on something. It just goes on and on. I tell them, “You can make a mess, but you’ve got to clean it up.”"I mean, how many stories have you read that aren’t true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up? And when we don’t split up, there’s a whole new round that we’ve made up and we’re back together again! We’ll get married when everyone can. We’re not splitting up. And we don’t have a seventh child yet."Pitt, whose new movie Moneyball opens September 23, also discusses why he adopted foreign-born children, lessons he learned from his father, and how he got that scar on his cheekbone. Check out PARADE this Sunday.
– Reese Witherspoon never regrets becoming an actress, but she does miss one thing: her privacy. "I parted with my privacy a long time ago," she tells Vogue in a new profile. "We went different ways. And sometimes I mourn it. Sometimes I will sit in the car and cry. Because I can’t get out." More from the interview, given a few months before Witherspoon's March 26 wedding: On the increased amount of attention she's been getting from the paparazzi: "It usually heats up during, like, pregnancies or babies or marriage. It’s the drama of real life. ... Readers want to know!" One good thing about all the attention: "I get hugged a lot. Which is fun." On her then-fiance, CAA agent Jim Toth: "He’s wonderful. He’s just a really great guy ... I just feel really lucky to be with someone who cares so much and is so kind and loving. You know? It’s a really nice thing to finally have that." On her current emotional state: "Even though I am nervous and excited and all those things people feel when they are about to get married, I think I am mostly very calm right now. Usually, I’m a little bit of a squirrel. I have a squirrelly energy." On turning 35: "I’ve had some really kind of sad moments lately. You don’t go backward! And I think 35 for a woman is a big thing. ... You can’t pretend you are an ingenue. You can’t pretend you are wide-eyed and innocent. It’s on your face! It’s in your body. It’s in your voice." Click for the full piece, or check out a picture from Reese's wedding or gossip about her honeymoon.