Jennifer Aniston and Catherine Keener are friends.

Outside, it’s January, Sundance 2006 is in full swing, and the main street of this tiny ski town has been transformed into paparazzi central. Nicole Holofcener’s indie comedy-drama ‘‘Friends With Money’’ is the festival’s kickoff movie, and like the director’s previous films, 1996’s ‘‘Walking and Talking’’ and 2001’s ‘‘Lovely and Amazing,’’ it’s a showcase for some of the industry’s most reliable and least-appreciated actresses. Catherine Keener, soon to be Oscar-nominated for playing Harper Lee in ‘‘Capote,’’ plays a neurotic screenwriter married to and emotionally abused by her writing partner (Jason Isaacs). The great Frances McDormand is a designer having a hilarious and touching midlife meltdown, while Joan Cusack plays their fussy, wealthy friend.

The fourth corner of this cinematic coffee klatsch is Jennifer Aniston as Olivia — the single one, the pothead, the pal who can’t get over her married ex-lover and who cleans houses for a living because a career would be too much work. Aniston has the schlumpiest role in ‘‘Friends With Money,’’ which opened Friday in Boston, but because she’s Jennifer Aniston, ex-‘‘Friends’’ star and spurned wife in the ongoing Brad/Angelina tabloid melodrama, she’s a Sundance front-page story. Gawkers stand 10 deep outside the ‘‘Friends With Money’’ publicity tent set up at the bottom of Main Street.

Inside that tent is — sorry — a thoroughly normal woman who seems closer to the easygoing Olivia than the Olympian drama queen on the cover of People. To forestall unseemly questions about Aniston’s home life, publicists have insisted she be interviewed with Keener, but that’s fine: The two yap merrily like, well, friends with money, stepping on each other’s sentences and telling gleeful little tales on each other. [Warning: The following interview is entirely Brad-free.)

Q: In ‘‘Friends With Money,’’ did you have any desire to play each other’s characters? Could you have played them?

Aniston: But wouldn’t that have been boring? I loved Olivia.

Keener: I think each one has a little of the others in them. They’re friends, and you often do that in a friendship: You select out the traits you like, even if it’s not conscious. When I read the script, I did look at Olivia’s part and thought that was who Nicole wanted me to play, because it was a little — it’s not dissimilar to characters I’ve played for her. But she wanted to allow me to have a fresh experience with her .

Q: How’d the script come to you, Jennifer?
[simultaneously]

Aniston: Nicole called, she basically asked me —

Keener: Nicole asked me if she would ever do it, and I said, ‘She loves your movies, I think she’d be thrilled’ —

Aniston: — and I couldn’t believe she was asking —

Keener: She’s very particular about casting, Nicole. No matter where you are and what profile you have in our acting community —

Aniston: — which I feel so grateful for, because there’s not many people that can see past that sometimes. Especially ..... [She stops herself.] In the independent world, you really do get to stretch a little and get out of your box, and that’s really refreshing. You gotta do that for your soul.

Q: And how exactly does one go about researching the role of a pot-smoking housecleaner?

Aniston: Well ... .

Keener: [whistles innocently] Well, what I’ve heard about pot —

Aniston: I Googled it —

Keener: It makes you get into things —

Aniston: — and you kind of obsessively do things. Really well.

Keener: Jennifer takes a lot of pride in her attention to detail —

Aniston: I have a girlfriend that I modeled Olivia after. I have my wonderful group of girlfriends, and there is the one who is younger than all of us, who hasn’t quite figured out exactly what she wants to do, slightly unmotivated but trying to motivate, and we’re always giving her clothes and footing the bill and loving her. And she’s happy — she’s not an unhappy person.

Keener: — She’s smart, educated —

Q: Has she seen the movie yet?

Aniston: No —

Keener: — And don’t write any of that. [laughs]

Q: Can you talk about the push-pull between celebrity and acting? Does your public image limit you when you’re choosing roles?

Aniston: I try not to think about that. As long as I feel I can do my job — and do it well — that will hopefully win. Part of it makes me want to leave Los Angeles, though, because I feel like just a piece of chum out there. I go to other places in the country —

Keener: — They don’t care —

Aniston: — And you’re another human being and there’s respect. You don’t see people looking at you with dollar signs in their eyes —

Keener: [interrupting] Can I? Just observing as a friend, I think that people with the kind of high profile that Jennifer has can go either way. You can rest on your image or your laurels, if there are laurels, or it can make you push harder to not be complacent. There are people like that, who just say ‘‘I’m stopping, I’m going to keep making these movies, I’m comfortable,’’ but those people, honestly, in 10 years? They’re angry, sad, bitter, and they want to stop doing [expletive] comedies. They want a real job. And, I tell you, the fame is what makes them like that, it’s not the work —

Aniston: — It’s seductive. It’s like this weird, dark goddess, and people get sucked into believing all that.

Q: Have you carved out a place in your life where you can go out to Starbucks or the bookstore?

Aniston: I do. It’s easier in certain places —

Keener: Mars. [laughs] I have to tell people when we’re in a grocery store shopping — well, this is what she does. She’ll put stuff like meat, which I don’t eat, in my cart —

Aniston: — Hee-hee —

Keener: — without my seeing it, so when I go to the register —

Aniston: — See, that’s a fun thing to do, sneak up on people and throw stuff into their cart —

Keener: — But also I’m the bodyguard who will say, ‘No, you can’t take a picture, she’s buying personal hygiene things here, just let her go through the express line’ —

Aniston: — Ha! —

Keener: — And sometimes you just have to gut up and say, yeah, this might not be the most likable thing I’ve ever done, but that’s OK, at least I’ll like myself at the end of the day —

Q: Catherine, you came to stardom a little later in your career —

Keener: ‘‘Later,’’ interesting. OK, I’m an old, old person.

Aniston: [cracks up]

Keener: We don’t really care, me and Shirley — no, it’s absolutely true, whatever modicum of fame I have —

Aniston: — You love your anonymity —

Keener: — Yeah. What was the question?x

Q: Whether coming to fame with a little more experience under your belt made you more wary about it, or wiser, or cynical. Or not.

Keener: You know, I hate saying that’s probably true, but it is. I am cynical about some things. Maybe I’m realistic. One of the first auditions for a film I had, I got very good notes in terms of the audition itself, but literally the director said, ‘‘She’s not sexy.’’ In the notes. And it came back to me. And I thought, that’s an absolute. I can’t do anything about that. And what I did was get in the car with my dog and drive to New Mexico and I spent three months in Roswell having the time of my life. And it just let me let go a little —

Aniston: That’s a nice story.

Keener: Not at the time. It was really demoralizing. I just thought, ‘‘I can’t work on that.’’ Now I don’t have that issue.

Q: Some people would say going to New Mexico for three months with your dog is sexy.

Keener: That’s sexy for me. And I’ll tell you, it made me feel that if they can say ‘‘No’’ to me, I can say ‘‘No’’ right back. And that helped me keep going.

Q: So what about ‘‘The 40-Year-Old-Virgin’’? Has your teenage boy recognition on the street improved?

Keener: It is so much better.

Aniston: [laughs] That was so fun. My God. Did you ever see it?

Keener: Yes, twice! I learned so much making it. You see, you had training in improvisation from ‘‘Friends.’’ You just throw it out. The movies I’ve done, you respect the writer and there’s no need to think about other lines, but this was one where they kept saying, ‘‘OK, now say something else!’’ There was never ‘‘cut.’’ With these guys who were so talented at improv, it was an amazing learning experience.

Q: Was there a lot of improv on ‘‘Friends With Money’’?

Keener: Nooo. Nicole writes like that —

Aniston: It’s her writing —

Keener: She’s a beautiful, understated, specific writer.

Aniston: We’re lucky.

Keener: It’s almost how you’re supposed to be able to write: one page, single-spaced. All the extra stuff’s gone.

Q: Is that a sensibility that’s at all respected in the film industry?

Keener: A lot of people in Los Angeles don’t recognize good writing, I’m sorry to say. It’s my opinion. People will make movies there with a lot of money, and I feel like what they perceive as good writing is often over-writing and has a lot of big scenes that just don’t ring true. I don’t know, it’s not the kind of writing I respond to.

Q: Can you give a specific example of how something might have played out differently on the set with Nicole as opposed to a male director?

Aniston: I don’t think I can make that distinction. There was a comfort on the set — and maybe it’s because I know her, too, through Keener. [to Keener] What’s the difference between a male and a female director? There’s something about feminine energy. It was extremely casual. We were filming in houses, changing in bathrooms —

Keener: — If you were uptight, forget it, it wasn’t a movie you wanted to work on —

Aniston: — It wasn’t a vanity piece, you didn’t wait around for lighting —

Keener: — People have commented that it’s not ‘‘beauty lighting,’’ and we love that. They’d be asking, ‘‘Are you aware of that?’’ when it was intentional on Nicole’s part. And the guys in the movie were however prickish they had to be to support our characters. It’s like team sports. You just want to do your part.

Q: Must be fun to have Frances McDormand on your team.

Keener: She’s amazing —

Aniston: — She’s the most fun —

Keener: — She’s got a killer whistle —

Aniston: — Scared the crap out of me —

Keener: — Like a paparazzi whistle —

Aniston: — She’s got power.

Q: Is it a given, Jennifer, that you’ll be part of Nicole’s troupe now?

Aniston: I don’t know. I don’t want to seem presumptuous. Or desperate. Maybe I’ll just ask her flat out, or beg her. It was a very safe environment at a time when it was tricky. [pause] I mean, there was a lot goin’ on. And it was just the perfect place to be. The perfect place.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.