Jennifer Aniston has explained why she turned down a role in the Saturday Night Live cast before Friends took off, saying she felt the sketch show at the time was “very male-dominated.”
The Morning Show star, 56, auditioned for SNL in the early 1990s, shortly before hit sitcom Friends arrived on the air in 1994.
Speaking on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Aniston said she made the bold decision to turn down SNL creator Lorne Michaels.
“I always thought I was such hot s***. The story of that is all very confusing,” she reflected.
She continued: “Honestly, today I’d have to ask Lorne, because I remember, I was in New York City, and I had a meeting with Lorne Michaels, and I ran into [Adam] Sandler and [David] Spade in the room right outside. And I knew Sandler forever.
“I don’t know why I had this self-righteous attitude of ‘I don’t know if women are treated the way they should be treated on this show. It’s... very male-dominated, I would love to be here if it was in the Gilda Radner day.’ I mean, this is the brain that semi-remembers things that are back that far. Something like that. I can’t remember, but I just remember Friends then happened.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Aniston rejected the suggestion that she is a “nepo baby.” Her father, John Aniston, starred on the soap opera Days of Our Lives for several decades, but Aniston said her father discouraged her from following in his footsteps.
“My dad was telling me, ‘Please don’t do this, you’re just going to suffer rejection,’” she recalled. “‘Just go get a job. Like, get a real job.’ All the cliché things. [But] whatever drives you, if you find passion in something and you love it, go do it.”
She added that it was natural for her to seek a career in the acting field, arguing: “I mean, look at all the law firms. Blanky Blank Blanky and Blanky Blank. I mean, all right, isn’t that a version of it’s all in the family? It’s all in the family. So, maybe you got into a door because you’re so-and-so’s kid, but if you suck, guess what? You’re not going to continue to do it.”
In the same interview, Aniston also revealed the unconventional items she asked an NBC boss for after the success of Friends.
