Jennifer Aniston Reveals She Removed People From Her Weekly Routine Over COVID-19 Vaccine Views

Jennifer Aniston says that she’s ended a few relationships in the past year over anti-vaccine stances and “opinions.”

For InStyle magazine’s September cover story, the award-winning Morning Show actress says that she “lost a few people in my weekly routine” that were among that “large group of people who are anti-vaxxers or just don’t listen to the facts.” And while Aniston says people are entitled to their own opinion, being in close proximity means, for her, there’s a “moral and professional” obligation attached to vaccination disclosure.

“It’s a real shame. I’ve just lost a few people in my weekly routine who have refused or did not disclose [whether or not they had been vaccinated], and it was unfortunate,” she tells the magazine. “I feel it’s your moral and professional obligation to inform, since we’re not all podded up and being tested every single day. It’s tricky because everyone is entitled to their own opinion — but a lot of opinions don’t feel based in anything except fear or propaganda.”

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During the interview, the actress and producer — who says she’ll begin working on Murder Mystery 2 with co-star Adam Sandler this fall — also opened up about how the pandemic had impacted her personally and professionally.

“There was so much good and so much horror all happening at once,” she says. “For me, the good was a big decompression and an inventory of, ‘What’s it all about?'”

Aniston shares that she liked working and being busy, and that “being idle is not preferable.” But that the pandemic and its respective quarantine time “was important for those who were willing to let it be a reset to slowdown, take all of this in, reassess, reevaluate and excavate.”

Part of that reset involved some reflection around the demands of her job — less so the craft and more the promotional elements of being a star. Dubbing it the “dog-and-pony show,” the actress questioned whether all the traveling for “press junkets, red carpets, the shiny-penny things” are necessary.

“The work is what I love to do. It’s the promotion of it that creates some stress in me,” she says. “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.”

She later adds, “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.”

While reflecting on her own experiences with the media, Aniston also weighs in on how she and other women in Hollywood, including Britney Spears, have been covered. When asked about the ’90s versus now, Aniston notes that some younger celebrities were never really allowed to grow up and figure out who they were — something the media, which was “feeding on young, impressionable girls,” took advantage of.

“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,'” she elaborates. “I think that [Spears’] 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.”

“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,” she adds later.