Jennifer Aniston Admits There’s ‘Definitely Some Mirroring Going on’ Between Her Life and Her Character in “The Morning Show ”(Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• At the season 4 premiere of The Morning Show in New York City, Jennifer Aniston tells PEOPLE how she handles fame differently than the fictional news anchor she plays, Alex Levy

• “She’s been such a fun character to play. I love playing her,” Aniston says of the role she’s had since 2018

• Season 4 of The Morning Show premieres Wednesday, Sept. 17, on Apple TV+

Jennifer Aniston can certainly find pieces of herself reflected in her character in The Morning Show.

Aniston has played news anchor Alex Levy since the Apple TV+ series premiered in 2019, and is back behind the desk for a fourth season, alongside her onscreen co-anchor Reese Witherspoon, starting Sept. 17.

At the New York City premiere of season 4 on Sept. 9, Aniston, 56, tells PEOPLE that “there’s definitely some mirroring going on” as she compares her own relationship with fame to that of her character’s.

“Oh my goodness,” she says, before admitting, “I think Alex is a lot more expressive and verbal than I am.”

There’s a catharsis to the role because of how differently her character handles fame. “There’s a little bit of — you get that out of your system, in the best way.”

“She’s been such a fun character to play,” Aniston continues. “I love playing her.”

A self-described “workaholic,” Aniston told PEOPLE at the beginning of the summer that she was “forcing myself to try to take some time to travel and not work.”

“It’s so critical, I know, but I’m not good at it,” she said of giving herself breaks in between her demanding schedule. “I’m trying to take it easy, because this was a really intensive few years of work.”

She lived up to her word and spent the summer traveling — she enjoyed a yacht trip in Europe with her new beau, Jim Curtis, and visited New York City several times — and is now back in work mode as she gears up for the season 4 premiere of The Morning Show.

The upcoming episodes pick up nearly two years after the dramatic end to season 3, which premiered in September 2023, and find Alex and the UBA team — Billy Crudup, Karen Pittman, Nicole Beharie, Mark Duplass and Greta Lee — grappling with “new responsibility, hidden motives and the elusive nature of truth in a polarized America” following the UBA-NBN merger.

As Aniston previously told PEOPLE, the season is “jam-packed” with drama. “The Morning Show is just a beast to film. It is layered, it’s complicated, it’s emotional, it hits on a lot of topics and current events, so let’s just say, it’s not Friends,” she quipped.

As executive producers on the show, she said she and Witherspoon, 49, are “involved in every single aspect of the show, on top of just the performance side, which is a big piece of it.”

“But I’ve got incredible support, and we have such an incredible team.”

The demands of making a show like the Apple TV+ hit have left Aniston with feelings that she can compare to “childbirth.”

“Every year since I finished the first season, I was like, Well, that’s it — I’m dead. That just killed me,” she told Glamour.

“I kind of compare it to what childbirth must be like when my friends are like, ‘You just kind of forget what it was, and then next thing you know, you’re knocked up again,'” she explained. “And having that same agony of pushing that watermelon out of a tiny little pinhole, and then you just get to do it again.”

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Season 4 of The Morning Show premieres Wednesday, Sept. 17 on Apple TV+.

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