Rumor has it that Jennifer...

How does a Hollywood superstar deal with rumors? Jennifer Aniston offers this tip: "You just tune them out and don’t listen to them the best you can until you start to hear them and then they just become humorous."

On a recent Sunday morning, The Philippine STAR had the rare chance to interview the very controversial actress to talk about her latest film, the ironically titled Rumor Has It, released by Warner Bros.

In Rumor Has It, Aniston is Sarah Huttinger, she is about to get engaged and she returns home for her sister’s wedding only to discover that her family may have been the basis for the book that was ultimately made into a movie called The Graduate. She finds out that her grandmother slept with the same boy who was dating her mother. And that boy could be her father!

"Sarah has never been able to explore or understand those things she felt were missing from her connection to her own family," the actress says about her character. "What we see in the film is her journey to finding her voice so that she can make the right choice."

But has she found her voice in the relentless tabloid frenzy surrounding her private life?

Clad in a chic black day dress and her blue eyes gleaming, Aniston came to our suite at the secluded Ritz Carlton in Pasadena with an unbelievable, although understandable, five – yes, five – assistants in tow!

A couple of weeks prior to the interview, the star had successfully lobbied to have paparazzi pictures of her sunbathing in the nude barred from being published.

And just mere days before the interview, tabloids all across America saw their copies sell out again with news of her being pregnant.

It is understandable to have five assistants tagging along, indeed.

But Aniston, who graced the covers of most magazines more than any other stars in 2005, was still friendly as she immediately relaxed to the seemingly harmless questions we initially posed.

After a careful sequencing of questions, we asked her what was the most ludicrous rumor ever spread about her. She just smiled and volunteered the most recent one, the one of her being pregnant with Vince Vaughn as the culprit.

With all the hounding and almost maniacal fascination with her private life, Aniston admitted that she sometimes considers finally leaving LA just to get away from all the paparazzi which make it their business to follow and record her every move.

"I realize now, every time when I go away, and more and more when I’m coming back, I just get this thing in my stomach and it’s a shame because I love California, I love my home," she discloses.

"There’s something that exists here that doesn’t exist anywhere else," she continues. "It’s ridiculous being a part of something that is absolutely pathetic and not real. It’s awful and it’s nobody’s business."

But is she giving up on Hollywood?

"No. I would still work. There are so many people who don’t live in California who work just to keep their sanity and I think that it’s a necessity and the good thing is you get to a point, now that I don’t have a day job like when I was doing Friends, where I don’t have to go to work everyday, I have that luxury because half the time you don’t film here anyway so you could live anywhere you want."

The actress, who is part-Greek, was born in the suburban city of Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles and spent a year in Greece during her childhood. She grew up in New York when her family relocated when she was nine.

She ventured into acting when she was 18 and toiled for several years acting in small productions until she found the mark with the hit NBC series Friends in 1994.

She became an overnight sensation with the success of Friends and her star further glimmered when she married Brad Pitt, who was the most eligible bachelor at the time, in 2000.

But on Jan. 7, 2005, after a seemingly blissful marriage, she sparked a tabloid frenzy when she announced that she was seeking a divorce from Pitt.

And there was no letting up from that day on.

Surprisingly, amid all these personal and public turmoil, the actress still found time to do three films which are coming out one after the other.

In Derailed, she stars as a femme fatale epitome opposite the brooding British actor Clive Owen and in The Break-Up she stars opposite real-life sweetheart Vince Vaughn.

In Rumor Has It she co-stars with Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo, Mena Suvari and Shirley MacLaine, who plays the Mrs. Robinson part.

A colleague quipped that there seem to be a correlation of titles of her three recent movies. The actress just kept mum.

"I’m fascinated with the spiritual and what that means and how it evolves every day and how I define that to myself. I’m not a religious person. I find organized religion to be really unbelievably destructive and hypocritical," she says on how she tunes out all the nasty talks about her.

And she seems to be successful at it because no matter how much we prod her to talk about Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Vaughn, she just focuses into a void and taps her inner spirituality and leaves us gossip-hounds waiting at bay. Sigh.

Rumor Has It opens in Manila on Jan. 18.