Jennifer Aniston

I’m not sure there’s any woman of my lifetime whose fertility has been more an object of interest for longer than Jennifer Aniston. Literal princesses have less attention paid to their uterus. I’ve been seeing articles about if she’s pregnant, will she be pregnant, does she want to get pregnant, is it too late for her to get pregnant, since before I even started watching Friends. She actually wrote an article about the whole thing in 2016—when she was 48—about how painful the scrutiny was. Because it was ongoing even then.

We could instead talk about her, you know, acting career. She’s yet another graduate of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Performing Arts, and you don’t get into that out of nepotism, no matter how many episodes of a soap opera your father’s been on. From there, she did the Struggling Actress thing, working odd jobs while performing off-Broadway. And then she moved to Hollywood, where she made her debut . . . in Mac and Me. Surely an auspicious start.

We could talk about how she persevered. She followed up Mac and Me with a sitcom called Molloy—which got canceled.She was Jeannie Bueller on the Ferris Bueller TV show—which got canceled.She was on all twenty episodes of The Edge—which got canceled. She was on a show called Muddling Through—which got canceled. Three of those weren’t even close to a full season, but Aniston kept going. After that point, she didn’t much want to, but she let herself be talked into yet another sitcom, knowing full well what could happen.

And, yes, we could talk about Friends. We could talk about Rachel. Arguably, Rachel is the character who experiences the most growth, starting out as a spoiled rich girl who’s never had to worry about anything but decides that the life she sees in her future isn’t the one she wants and leaves. She learns how to be poor, which I have to tell you is probably the hardest lesson any of the characters face. And if I found the Ross and Rachel thing insufferable after a while, and if some parts of the show have definitely ages better than others, well, it’s still an interesting character.

Heck, we could talk about her philanthropy. She’s got Friends money; she could spend the rest of her life lying on a couch eating bonbons, but she’s still out there. Acting, yes, but also trying to improve the world. She’s given half a million dollars to Doctors Without Borders. She’s constantly campaigning for support for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. She gives money toward hurricane relief, cancer research, building music schools in Rwanda, and an orphanage in Tijuana. And that’s just a start. Isn’t all that more interesting than her uterus?