Sorry, what? It was revealed that Jennifer Aniston was asked to lose a whopping 30 pounds before she was cast as Rachel Green on Friends — the role that catapulted her into superstardom. It’s extremely surprising that she underwent such a serious weight loss.
In a new book, titled ‘Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era’, Saul Austerlitz said it was always tough to be a woman in the industry and match up to its impossibly high beauty standards.
“She had to lose thirty pounds if she wanted to stay in Hollywood. Los Angeles was a tough place to be an actress, it was a tough place to be a woman, and Jennifer Aniston’s agent was reluctantly leveling with her,” Austerlitz writes.
According to the excerpts obtained by People magazine, Aniston once received a callback where she was told to wear a leotard, and she jokingly said to her agent: “This’ll blow it for me.”
Her representative, in turn, “responded seriously”.
“Aniston was hardly fat — everyone could see she was beautiful — but as the show she would one day become indelibly associated with later made a point of noting, the camera added 10 pounds,” Austerlitz added.
Aniston had also discussed the same call back in a 1996 interview with The Rolling Stones magazine.
“My agent gave it to me straight. Nicest thing he ever did …. The disgusting thing of Hollywood — I wasn’t getting lots of jobs ’cause I was too heavy,” Aniston had said at that time.
