Jennifer Aniston says she and Gwyneth Paltrow discuss shared ex Brad Pitt

Jennifer Aniston proves that even celebrities gossip about their exes to one another. In a recent profile for Vanity Fair, the Morning Show star revealed that, “of course,” she and longtime friend Gwyneth Paltrow still discuss their mutual ex, Brad Pitt.

Aniston reflected on her decades-long friendship with Paltrow, whom she met when the Oscar winner worked alongside her Friends costar David Schwimmer in The Pallbearer. “Ironically, I went to her and Brad’s engagement party,” Aniston recalled.

When asked if she and Paltrow ever talk about Pitt, Aniston confirmed, remaking that “of course” they do.

“How can we not? We’re girls,” she added.

Paltrow and Pitt met as costars on the set of David Fincher’s 1995 horror movie Se7en and were engaged by 1996. Their former couple split the following year before ever making it down the aisle.

The Shakespeare in Love star went on to marry Coldplay’s Martin from 2003 to 2016, and they share two children together, Apple and Moses. She married writer and producer Brad Falchuk in 2018.

Aniston and Pitt, meanwhile, were set up by their agents in 1998. Pitt proposed the following November, and they were married in July 2000. Their relationship lasted a fair bit longer than Pitt’s whirlwind romance with Paltrow.

The former golden couple famously called it quits in October 2005, after Pitt starred with Angelina Jolie, his now ex-wife, in their 2005 action-comedy film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Pitt and Jolie first met when the film went into production in 2003, and the pair began publicly dating soon after his divorce from Aniston.

“Because of the film, we ended up being brought together to do all these crazy things, and I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened,” Jolie told Vogue in 2006. “I think a few months in, I realized, ‘God, I can’t wait to get to work.’ … Anything we had to do with each other, we just found a lot of joy in it together and a lot of real teamwork. We just became kind of a pair.”

For Aniston, it was a time marked by persistent tabloid coverage of “the love triangle.” She told VF that her approach to survival during the intense media scrutiny surrounding her divorce was: “Just pick yourself up by the bootstraps and keep on walking, girl.”

She continued, “It was such juicy reading for people. If they didn’t have their soap operas, they had their tabloids. It’s a shame that it had to happen, but it happened. And boy did I take it personally.”

“They were sort of building us up and then tearing you down,” she said, comparing herself to a piñata. “I didn’t have a strong enough constitution to not get affected by it. We’re human beings, even though some people don’t want to believe we are. They think, You signed up for it, so you take it. But we really didn’t sign up for that.”

After her divorce from Pitt, Aniston married Justin Theroux in 2015. They divorced in 2018, but the pair have always had kind words to say about one another in the years since they announced their split in February of that year.

“I would say we’ve remained friends,” Theroux told PEOPLE in April 2021. “We don’t talk every day, but we call each other. We FaceTime. We text. Like it or not, we didn’t have that dramatic split, and we love each other. I’m sincere when I say that I cherish our friendship.”

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Aniston and Paltrow’s friendship outlasted both women’s romantic relationships with Pitt, which the Horrible Bosses star told VF has been helpful when she’s in need of some advice.

“We’re always swapping advice — ‘What are you doing for this? What are you doing for that? Do you have a new doctor for that?'” Aniston revealed.

Which leads one to wonder: Did Paltrow ask Aniston for advice before dropping goop’s headline-making, $75 “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle?? The world may never know.