Do you want to see what Jennifer Aniston looks like without make-up? (Or without the kind that makes one look better, anyway.) Then Cake is the film for you – a gritty, indie drama that sees the glamorous Aniston playing a bedraggled, frumpy woman who is addicted to pain medication. She’s caked in a foundation that makes her face look greasy and jaundiced. White, puffy scars run across her chin and her cheek and her forehead, hinting at a trauma that will slowly reveal itself. Her hair is unwashed, her clothes the baggy khaki-linen variety of a woman who’s just given up. Aniston found the experience of acting without make-up “quite awesome and liberating, to tell you the truth. It was sort of a big deal, personally, for me to expose that, because I think we’re all very, you know, concerned with how we look on a 50-foot screen.”
There is nothing new in beautiful, glamorous actresses shedding their vanity and personal stylists to do something “real”: Renee Zellweger put on the pounds for Bridget Jones’s Diary; Toni Collette did similar for Muriel’s Wedding; and Charlize Theron won the Oscar by not being beautiful in Monster. If the idea of the usually lovely Aniston being anything but sexy is too much for you, fear not: this December she returns as a sexually-voracious dentist in Horrible Bosses 2.
