Perhaps you felt it. Over the weekend. Something seismic, two forces that are greater than the sum of their parts colliding publicly for the first time in years, triggering a nostalgia earthquake. That’s right: Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston reunited.
It happened backstage at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, a place full of HD cameras and smartphones and gossip-needing lookie-loos—so the reunion was covered from every angle imaginable. While tabloids are probably, bless them, already firing off headlines about how the reunion proves Pitt and Aniston are back together and/or pregnant with a secret baby, it was mostly just a chummy meeting between two exes who are very professional and fairly cool with each other.
But...someone has to win, right? Isn’t that the thing about breaking up? For years after Pitt and Aniston’s 2005 divorce, the Friends star was painted as lonely and heartsick, fending off pregnancy rumors every other hour while Pitt trotted around the globe with Angelina Jolie and their international brood. (Pitt and Jolie are now going through a divorce.) But now?! Now Aniston’s the victor, casually playing down the Pitt reunion even as it sets the internet ablaze.
In a Sunday night interview with Extra, Aniston said she thought it was “sweet” that Pitt watched backstage as she accepted her award for best female actor in a drama series for The Morning Show. (Pitt himself had just won the best-supporting-actor statuette for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood moments before.)
“We’ve all grown up together,” Aniston said. “We really have. It just feels like a really fun night to celebrate and cheer each other on and keep working.”
She continued, broadening the scope of her remarks. “You don’t really have that much of a life, so it’s nice to come out and put a pretty dress on and celebrate your friends and their work and inspire each other to keep going.”
But then she did a callback, circling around to...Pitt’s acceptance speech. In his lengthy address—during which he mocked Quentin Tarantino’s foot fetish and dragged his own love life—Pitt got sentimental about his craft, man, celebrating his fellow actors and telling them to “enjoy the evening, ’cause tomorrow it’s back to work.”
“Like he said, it’s back to work tomorrow,” Aniston said. And that’s that.
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