Jennifer Aniston didn’t think her career would survive ‘embarrassing’ killer leprechaun movie

Before ‘Friends’, actor played a teenage girl stalked by an Irish monster who believed she’d stolen his pot of gold

Jennifer Aniston has revealed she didn’t think her career would survive an “embarrassing” movie about a killer leprechaun.

Before she found fame in Friends, Aniston made her film debut in the 1993 horror movie Leprechaun. It starred Warwick Davis as a grotesque Irish monster who stalks the teenage girl (Aniston) he believes has stolen his pot of gold.

In a new video interview for InStyle Magazine, Aniston admitted the movie today has a “cult” fanbase, but that at the time she worried it would ruin her career.

During a video challenge in which she plucked items from a bag that hold particular meaning to her life, Aniston reminisced about her 1999 film Office Space, in which she played a bored waitress increasingly at odds with her tyrannical boss. The movie was not a hit at the box office, but has developed a cult following in the years since its release.

“Office Space [was] one of the first movies I ever did,” Aniston said. “No one thought it would become the cult classic that it did, but it’s pretty cool if you ask me.”

She continued: “There’s loads of movies where you’re thinking: ‘Oh god, this is just… how am I going to survive this in my future?’ And then it’s a cult… ‘something’ because it’s so embarrassing.”

Aniston then clarified that she didn’t mean to imply Office Space was “embarrassing”.

“That movie wasn’t! That movie was special,” she said, before whispering: “I was talking about Leprechaun.”

Jennifer Aniston in 2020, and in the DVD artwork for her 1993 film ‘Leprechaun' (Alberto E Rodriguez/Getty Images/Lionsgate)

In 2019, Aniston said she had re-watched Leprechaun a decade earlier with her then-boyfriend Justin Theroux for “s***s and giggles”. She admitted she kept “walking in and out” of the room “cringing” as it played.

The Morning Show star this week also revealed that she has cut friends from her life due to their “anti-vax” views.