Wait—Jennifer Aniston Starred in a TV Show Before ‘Friends’?
Jennifer Aniston wasn’t an overnight success: By the time she landed her breakout role on Friends, she had already been a series regular on four other TV shows, including two that debuted within weeks of each other in 1990. The first was the short-lived Fox sitcom Molloy, in which Aniston played the self-absorbed step-sister of Mayim Bialik’s title character. The second also met swift cancellation but at least had more name recognition: NBC’s Ferris Bueller, based on the 1986 hit film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
For Ferris Bueller, as actor Charlie Schlatter took over the lead part from big-screen star Matthew Broderick, Aniston succeeded Jennifer Grey in the role of Jeannie Bueller, Ferris’ sister. And former GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson, who worked as a writer’s assistant on the series, offered a “little dirt” on Aniston in a 2014 essay about his time in Hollywood.
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The actress “was lovely, kept to herself on the set, smoldering a bit like her outraged character, 17-year-old Jeannie Bueller,” Nelson said of Aniston. “She was a brunette then, with none of Rachel Green’s bob or self-possession.”
According to Nelson, everyone on the Ferris Bueller set thought Aniston was hot — including Schlatter, with whom the future A-lister had a “brief, torrid romance,” he added. (Nelson reminded readers that Aniston and Schlatter were playing siblings on the sitcom. “To we immaturions on the show, this seemed extra-hot,” he wrote.)
The problem with TV’s Ferris Bueller, Nelson said, is that it was meaner than its cinematic inspiration. “There is none of that winking charm that made the [John] Hughes film a smash,” he wrote. “Ferris is too arrogant, the dialogue too fast and sarcastic.”
Aniston discussed the project in a 1990 interview with Entertainment Tonight, shortly after the then-21-year-old landed the part of Jeannie. “You had one day [in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off], and now you’re just going to see the continuation of what this kid is all about and all the other things he gets himself mixed up in, and it should be fun.”
And playing a farcical character was “what makes it fun, because you can go just a little bit overboard, make it really crazy,” Aniston said at the time. “Makes it more fun for me!”
Aniston went on to star in the 1992 Fox sketch-comedy series The Edge — alongside, coincidentally enough, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off alum Alan Ruck — and Muddling Through, the 1994 CBS sitcom from which Aniston was famously rescued for Friends.
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