Five hours and sixteen minutes. That’s all it took for Jennifer Aniston to hit one million followers on Instagram last fall. Most people would be shell-shocked by that record-setting rush of attention. But not Aniston, who knows a thing or two about being followed. A paparazzi magnet and tabloid fixture since the mid-’90s, when she launched a thousand haircuts as Rachel Green on the generational sitcom Friends, the Emmy-winning actor, now 51, has been an object of our affection and fascination for half her life.

 she surprised everyone by returning to television in the palace-intrigue drama The Morning Show, to play a fiery anchor, alongside Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, grappling with age and power dynamics in the #MeToo era. And while the parallels between Aniston and her character might be tempting to draw, the truth, she tells her friend and drinking buddy Sandra Bullock, is stranger than tabloids. 

My gut reaction was to say all of the above. It’s not so much what I see myself doing, but it’s more like a little screenshot in my brain, where I hear the ocean, I see the ocean, I hear laughter, I see kids running, I hear ice in a glass, I smell food being cooked. That’s the joyous snapshot in my head.

I think that it comes from growing up in a household that was destabilized and felt unsafe, watching adults being unkind to each other, and witnessing certain things about human behavior that made me think: “I don’t want to do that.

When I landed in Los Angeles at 20 years old and I fell into those girls who are still sitting around the table today, they were on a different path. I’d never had a circle of women who got together and talked forever. I was like, “God, these California people don’t shut up. They talk about their feelings and cry in front of each other.” I said to myself, “Here I am, a girl who grew up in New York City, and now I find myself in Laurel Canyon, wearing a flowery dress and someone put a crystal around my neck and is burning sage around my head. I have landed on Mars.” But I really think it was something that saved me

Turning on the television, listening to the news, reading the paper—that can make me really sad and really angry. The division that’s been taking place. The complete chaos that’s existing. When people show greed and bad behavior and a lack of gratitude. It’s so hard to put this in an eloquent way. When you see people behaving badly and hurting other people, that makes me very angry. And abuse of animals, obviously.