Jennifer Aniston Has Been Laughing at Jason Bateman for 22 Years: Inside Their Friendship

Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman have appeared in five movies together, so when they hit the red carpet together last night to screen Office Christmas Party, the comfort level was high. So high, in fact, that we got to see the actress crack up at him in all her apple-cheeked glory.

While Aniston may have played things up for the camera a little (she is an actress!), the Friends alum, 47, and Bateman, also 47, go way, way back, so a high comfort level would make sense. They met during a ski trip to Aspen when they was 25 — making it 22 years ago — and it sounded like things got a little wild.

“We were all renting a house together,” she recalled to E! News earlier this week during a joint interview with Bateman. “We went to a holiday party in Aspen. … We were at that guy’s house, and you drove the Range Rover backward with the door swung open up the street.”

Bateman, who now abstains from alcohol (he admitted that his partying lifestyle almost led to the collapse of his marriage to Amanda Anka), shot back, “A lot of fun stuff happens in the mountains. It’s the altitude!”

Aniston also talked in a 2009 Details interview about that ski trip, saying one of her favorite things about Bateman, a child star in TV shows including Silver Spoons and The Hogans, was that there is “no bulls*** with him.” And “Even though he was pretty wild in those days, something about those dimples and that sweet face made you go, ‘Oh, it’s OK that you just drove up the street backwards in a Range Rover with the door wide open.’ I don’t know what was happening there. You feel instantly safe in his company.”

So safe that they’ve appeared in four additional movies: The Breakup, The Switch, Horrible Bosses, and Horrible Bosses 2. So what’s the reason behind all those on-screen collaborations? Blackmail, he has joked.

“That’s all gonna come out in my autobiography,” he told the Guardian in 2011. “I’ve got a great deal of dirt on Ms. Aniston, and as long as she continues to hire me for her projects, I will not show the pictures.” Seriously though. “We’ve always just really gotten along well,” he said. “I think I was just fortunate to be a good fit for parts in her films.”

While promoting The Switch together in 2010, she was a little bit more serious with her response.
“We’ve known each other for a long time. We do just have easy chemistry,” Aniston said at the press junket.

During the same sit-down, Bateman said that when he and Aniston first worked together, after being friends for so long, they had “kind of an instant connection. Once we got the chance to spend every day with one another, it exponentially grew. We took what we had off-camera and dragged it to the front of the camera. It was criminally easy. I was joking all day yesterday that we should probably give a lot of our money back.”

Their friendship has matured to include their spouses. Bateman and his wife of 15 years, Anka, were two of the approximately 70 guests invited to Aniston’s secret, intimate wedding to Justin Theroux in 2015. Even better than that, Bateman and Anka accompanied the couple — and a small group of their other friends — on a post-wedding honeymoon in Bora Bora.

Yes, Bateman is part of Aniston’s Mexico crew — though he doesn’t have the same stamina as the rest of her party people. When they were all in Los Cabos, Mexico, celebrating her 41st birthday, Bateman snuck off to bed.

“We danced for hours, seven hours,” Aniston said at The Switch press junket. However, “It was 10 p.m., and I said to Amanda, ‘Where’s Jason?’ We’re in Mexico. Everyone’s dancing. And he went to bed.”

Bateman quipped, “I’m never happier than in the bed.”

Even though he crashes early, he still gets invites. In fact, the couples rang in the new year together this year. And they’re probably booking plane tickets for this year as we type.