Where Are Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux’s Wedding Photos?
Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux may not want you — or us! — to see their wedding photos. (Getty Images)
Jennifer Aniston is holding out on us.
The tanned and beaming bride made her first post-wedding public appearance Wednesday at the L.A. premiere of her new movie She’s Funny That Way. Showing her media savvy, she easily swatted away questions about her intimate wedding with Justin Theroux, shooting back prepared responses like, “We had the beautiful luxury of having a beautiful, private moment and I’m going to be selfish and keep it that way!”
It’s very possible that we may never see photos from the Aug. 5 wedding held at the couple’s Bel-Air estate. We won’t see how good her famous yoga body looked in her wedding gown. (Or know the designer!) We won’t get a glimpse of Jimmy Kimmel presiding over the ceremony. We won’t see the looks on their faces when Howard Stern razzed them a bit during his wedding toast.
It’s Actually Already Pretty Late in the Game
When it comes to the wedding photos of A-list celebrities, things are usually happening by now. While her wedding was only two weeks ago, typically big bucks deals are in place well before a couple walks down the aisle. Though, to be fair, some of those bucks are funneled to the stars’ charitable foundations. It’s not like Aniston, who inked a $5 million endorsement deal with Emirates Airlines the week she was married, needed the money to pay for her Bora Bora honeymoon.
Even in the cases of secret weddings — like Aniston’s or her ex Brad Pitt’s to Angelina Jolie’s last summer — a deal can be struck quickly. The top celebrity publicists have direct lines to magazine editors and the wedding photos could appear on a glossy cover just days later. And someone like Aniston — whose love life has been magazine fodder for a decade since her high-profile divorce — has editors salivating.
Let’s look at how four of the biggest weddings in the last year-plus played out in terms of when they married and when their photos were released:
George Clooney & Amal Alamuddin — 3 days
Wedding date: Sept. 27
Publication date: Sept. 30
Outlet: People (and Hello! internationally)
Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt — 9 days*
Wedding date: Aug. 23, 2014 (*though they didn’t announce they had married until Aug. 28)
Publication date: Sept. 1
Outlet: People (and Hello! internationally)
People is the go-to magazine for A-listers shopping wedding photos. (People)
Jessica Simpson & Eric Johnson — 2 days
Wedding date: July 5, 2014
Published: July 7, 2014
Outlet: People
Kim Kardashian & Kanye West — 3 days
Wedding date: May 24, 2014
Published: May 27, 2014
Outlet: Instagram
Kim and Kanye bucked the trend and posted their first wedding photo on Instagram. It was the most liked pic of the year on the photo-sharing site. (Instagram)
Is Withholding Wedding Photos the New Black?
In all of those instances, the turnaround time was mere days. However, since the fall we’ve seen some VIPs tie the knot and not release any photos whatsoever. Our prying eyes will likely never see how Scarlett Johansson looked when she married Romain Dauriac in Montana last October. Ditto Cameron Diaz when she said “I do” to Benji Madden in January. And it’s likely the only photos of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s February wedding we’ll get to see are grainy ones like this:
We think Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are here… somewhere. (Splash News)
There’s still a chance, of course, that Aniston could still release the pics. But where? Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres were both guests at the wedding. She could appear on one of their shows and casually unveil herself in a veil. The actress always been a fan of Vanity Fair — that’s where, in her first post-split interview, she vented about her ex-husband’s missing “sensitivity chip"— so maybe she and editor Graydon Carter have something worked out. She could even pull a Blake Lively, and four months after the wedding, share photos of the wedding décor — not her or Ryan Reynolds! — in a bridal mag like Martha Stewart Weddings. Aniston isn’t on Instagram (she’s called social media "too much pressure”), so we can cross that option off the list.
Everything Is Very Calculated in Hollywood
The truth is, by now Aniston has a well-thought-out plan for the photos — whether it’s to keep them for herself or share them with the world. In 2013, we interviewed Robert Evans, who did the photography for Aniston and Pitt’s 2000 wedding. He shared the ins and out of having such a high-profile gig and it’s incredibly calculated, down to how he was initially told he was hired to photograph a Shell Oil corporate party, learning later that was a code name for the wedding of the year. It was only two days before the couple wed that he was brought to Jen and Brad’s home to meet them.
Photographer Robert Evans captured this pic of Jen’s first wedding — though he said there were many better photos to choose from. (People)
vans, who also photographed Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s Italian wedding and Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton’s country affair, said that after snapping his last wedding photos of Jen and Brad’s nuptials at 2 a.m., he traveled directly to a lab — with a security guard “because the bounty on their wedding was a million dollars” — to develop and edit the 1,000 images. He was done the next day at 7 p.m. — these were pre-digital days and processing and editing took longer — and the guard took the negatives, proofs, and a bag of images that had been shredded from him directly back to Brad and Jen’s handlers. Just one image from the thousand — a memorable black-and-white shot — was released publicly.
“I gave the security guard everything,” Evans told Yahoo. “After I did that, the only thing that I really had was to be able to say is, ‘Yeah, I [photographed Jen and Brad’s wedding], but I didn’t really have anything to show for it.’”
Though Jen did call him a year later to ask him to make her wedding albums — and when he did, he made a few prints to keep for himself. And those, he said, are the better shots than the one the public has seen. “Typically what gets published, in my personal, artistic opinion, isn’t the best stuff,” he explained. “The magazines tend to want very straightforward, boring photos, if you will. [Plus], you have to work in conjunction with their publicists and their managers, and sometimes even get celebrity approval on what you’ve done.”
A Truly Private Affair
Asked about how she pulled off a secret wedding, Jen told Good Morning America on Thursday, “Where there is a will, there is a way.” Maybe it will also be her will to keep the photos private. Like the last time, have them put in an album — like your typical bride — and keeping the viewing audience limited to themselves. Beyond their 70 wedding guests, nobody else will see their first kiss. Nobody will see their first dance. And nobody will see them cut their awesome Muppet cake.
After all that she’s been through — with everybody overinvolved in her personal life — that sounds like an incredibly romantic ending to us.
