10 Movie Actors Who Were Discovered In Unusual Ways

3. Jennifer Aniston Was Discovered While Complaining At A Petrol Station

Vin Diesel Fast and Furious
Warner Bros.

Many actors are used to failure and rejection - that feeling of a movie or a TV pilot failing miserably, or going to audition after audition after audition, only for none of them to result in a steady job.

This was the exact position Jennifer Aniston found herself in during the early 1990s. At this point, she'd already been in several TV pilots and obscure movies, none of which had led to that big break she so desperately craved. She was close to giving up, but soon enough, she got the little bit of luck that she needed in order to make her acting dreams a reality.

In a pure coincidence, Aniston just so happened to run into Warren Littlefield - who, at the time, was the president of NBC Entertainment - at a petrol station on Sunset Boulevard. Littlefield liked Aniston, and he was familiar with some of her previous work, so when she lamented "Will it ever happen for me?" he thought to himself that he hoped it would.

This chance encounter was a turning point for Aniston's career. Littlefield remembered her while developing Friends, and the actress soon auditioned for - and won - the now-iconic role of Rachel Green, culminating in a pretty successful movie career to boot.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.