Jake Gyllenhaal remembers his first meeting with Brad Pitt all too well.
Back in 2002, while working on The Good Girl, the actor had "a lot of racy scenes" with Pitt's then-wife Jennifer Aniston, he recalled to W Magazine. "I remember putting my hand out to shake his, and accidentally hitting the door. He said, so confidently and kindly, 'Well, you have another one. It's all right.' He was very, very, very sweet to me, and it was actually a really lovely exchange. But, yeah—I was starstruck." And really, who wouldn't be?
Though just about anyone living on this planet knows Pitt and Aniston have since split, they've defied the odds and remained good friends, supporting one another at award shows, celebrating birthdays together and even reuniting for that Fast Times at Ridgemont High virtual table read.
"Brad and I are buddies. Like, we're friends and we speak," Aniston said on a June episode of The Howard Stern Show when asked about the table read. "There's no oddness at all except for everyone that probably watched it and was wanting there to be."
And though their relationship (as well as her union with Justin Theroux) didn't pan out the way she expected, Aniston still considers her marriages "very successful."
"When they came to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy, and sometimes happiness didn't exist within that arrangement anymore," she told ELLE in 2018. "Sure, there were bumps, and not every moment felt fantastic, obviously, but at the end of it, this is our one life and I would not stay in a situation out of fear. Fear of being alone. Fear of not being able to survive. To stay in a marriage based on fear feels like you're doing your one life a disservice. When the work has been put in and it doesn't seem that there's an option of it working, that's okay. That's not a failure."