Jennifer Aniston ‘ordered to lose 30 pounds’ before starring in Friends

Oh, come on.

Hollywood used to be a fairly explicitly seedy place. Now it's just an implicitly seedy one. What used to be fair game and normal when it came to the treatment of women is still happening, just not in public anymore. Just a few decades ago, romance, sex, and weight weren't something that a woman could choose to control herself - not if she wanted to get work. And although it's fairly likely that most of our favourite female actors have been told to lose weight at one point or another, actually hearing about specific instances is still fairly depressing. One actor who was told she had to change her body if she wanted to stay in the industry was Jennifer Aniston. According to Saul Austerlitz in his new book, Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era, Aniston was told to lose weight at the very beginning of her career, lest her work dry up. “She had to lose 30 pounds if she wanted to stay in Hollywood,” he wrote. “Los Angeles was a tough place to be an actress — it was a tough place to be a woman — and Jennifer Aniston’s agent was reluctantly leveling with her. “Aniston was hardly fat — everyone could see she was beautiful — but as the show she would one day become indelibly associated with later made a point of noting, the camera added 10 pounds." Jesus, like. Aniston later recalled an instance during a callback when she was told to wear a leotard, and stating, jokingly, that wearing it would "ruin" her chances of being cast in whatever role she was going for. "My agent gave it to me straight,” she told Rolling Stone in 1996. “Nicest thing he ever did (...) The disgusting thing of Hollywood — I wasn’t getting lots of jobs because I was too heavy.” Disgusting, indeed.