Jennifer Aniston admitted Friday on a PaleyFest L.A. panel for “The Morning Show” that despite the heady, ultra-prescient themes of the hit Apple TV+ series, she’d rather “keep my head in the sand” on “hard” subjects like the shifting state of Hollywood and billionaires’ impact on media.
“I keep my head in the sand a lot. There’s a lot I need to know. There’s a lot of ‘ignorance is bliss’ for me because it is almost too hard to take a deep-dive looking at what’s actually happening in the world,” Aniston said.
Panel moderator Kara Swisher — a noted fan of “The Morning Show” and the tech journalist thorn in the side of Elon Musk and other billionaires, a la the fictional Paul Marks (played by Jon Hamm) — grilled stars and EPs Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, costars Mark Duplass, Karen Pittman, Nicole Beharie and Tig Notaro, with Season 3 showrunner Charlotte Stoudt and EPs Michael Ellenberg and Mimi Leder for over an hour at the Dolby Theatre about the show’s content and its of-the-moment dialogue with the real world.
Between examining entertainment corporations’ shift to streaming, billionaires’ impact on news and media and political divides that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and deep-seated partisanship, “The Morning Show” has tackled it all.
Following comments from Witherspoon about the importance of data transparency and how post-Hollywood strike contraction in film and TV development informs decisions at her production company Hello Sunshine, Swisher asked Aniston how similar threats to Hollywood as we’ve known it impact her life as an entertainer and on the production front with her Echo Films, the company she cofounded with Kirstin Hahn in 2008.
After admitting that “ignorance is bliss” so as not to become overwhelmed with some of these subjects, she agreed with Witherspoon, who questioned whether “careers like ours [are] possible ever again.” She explained that they came up at a different time in Hollywood.
“I am such a — we did start in this industry at a time when it was so glamorous and so fun,” Aniston said. “Just to go on auditions and auditions and just hope that you get it. And if you get that Movie of the Week and then hope you get that, you know, that little guest star on ‘Quantum Leap.’”
She joked to the audience that some probably didn’t even know what that was, before continuing.
“It was so simple, and now it is becoming so — it’s too much sometimes,” she said. “So I have partners that help out a lot.”
