Jennifer Aniston would rather not make her intimate moments on set with friend Jon Hamm any more awkward than they already are.
In her latest interview with Variety, the actress opens up about the steamy love scene she shot with her pal on The Morning Show for the show’s third season after their characters, Alex Levy and Paul Marks, became an item. While discussing the scene, Aniston revealed that she had a level of comfort with her longtime friend.
“Having Mimi [the director] there, you’re protected,” Aniston tells the magazine. “I never felt uncomfortable. Jon was such a gentleman, always — I mean every move, every cut, ‘You OK?’ It was also very choreographed. That’s the beauty of Mimi and our gorgeous editor, the music and lighting. So, you don’t prepare.”
In fact, she was so comfortable with Hamm, she didn’t want to make things weird with an intimacy coordinator.
“They asked us if we wanted an intimacy coordinator,” she adds. “I’m from the olden days, so I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ They said, ‘Where someone asks you if you’re OK,’ and I’m like, ‘Please, this is awkward enough!’ We’re seasoned — we can figure this one out. And we had Mimi there.”
According to the Screen Actors Guild, an intimacy coordinators role is to act as “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production…in regard to nudity and simulated sex and other intimate and hyper-exposed scenes.”
Aniston also opened up about her longtime relationship with “the Hammanator” and playing opposite his complex character, who many would view as a “snake.”
“But was he?” the Friends actress says about Hamm’s character. “Or was that just his nature? I don’t think he felt that it was intentional. He just is who he is. But that was fun. I’ve known the Hammanator for a long, long time.”
Another person from the series that she has invested a lot of time with, both on and off-screen, is Reese Witherspoon.
“We’ve been in each other’s lives for 20-something years. It’s just in our DNA that we are collaborators,” she tells Variety of the show’s executive producer. “We’re partners. We’re friends. We’re girlfriends, we share all sorts of heartbreaks in life and love and everything.”
Witherspoon adds, “There’s a comfort to that. It’s just mutual respect and years of experience. And I think we’re both incredulous that we’re both still kicking around! That we’re still working at this level is such a privilege. It’s an honor to get to contribute to something that’s really speaking about the world we live in nowadays.”
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