Will Poulter ‘Felt Very Sorry’ for Jennifer Aniston After Their Iconic ‘We’re the Millers’ Kiss

Will Poulter now feels very sorry that Jennifer Aniston had to kiss him. In a candid interview for The Independent, the actor opened up about how he wishes there had been an intimacy coordinator on set for the 2013 comedy We're the Millers. Poulter, who is now 29 years old, starred in the film with Jennifer Aniston, Emma Roberts, and Jason Sudeikis when he was just 19 years old.

The movie follows Sudeikis as a marijuana smuggler from Mexico who employs three misfits to masquerade as his family to evade border patrol. Aniston portrayed his fictitious wife, and Roberts and Poulter played his fictitious children.

Aniston and Roberts' characters teach Poulter's teenage boy character how to kiss in a scene that was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss. Poulter said that Aniston, who was 45 at the time, “was an amazing sport and very supportive.” The actor was all praises for Aniston. 

“She took care of me and was aware that, being a 19-year-old kid in that scenario, I was very nervous. This was before intimacy coordinators, which I really would have appreciated, and I’m sure Emma and Jen would have, too,” he said. “It’s one of those things – any scene where there’s some level of intimacy in the context of a broad comedy, where it’s very much a joke and it’s not played with romantic sincerity, is always really awkward. My main concern at that moment was for Jen and Emma, who I felt very sorry for.”

The sequence, in Jennifer Aniston's opinion, was pretty awkward. Her deepest worry, she admitted in an interview from 2013, per Us Weekly, was that she had almost committed a crime when she kissed her co-star Will Poulter, who was 19 years old, for a scene in We're the Millers. The 44-year-old actress expressed her anxiety, saying, "It's so disturbing. He's very young. He was underage. I thought this was kind of illegal," Aniston said.

"Did you break a law when filming this scene?" Conan O'Brien asked her in response. "It was just a kiss. That's not illegal," she replied. Even though it was legal, Aniston nonetheless made sure and checked legal parameters before kissing the British actor. "I hope you had someone look into it!" O'Brien joked. "I looked way into it! Are you kidding?" she exclaimed.

Director of We're the Millers Rawson M. Thurber claimed in a Collider interview that Poulter was only supposed to kiss co-star Emma Roberts, who was only two years his senior and portrayed his fictitious sister in the movie, in the original script. "I think it was Jen who thought it would be funny if Rose joined in, which made all the difference in the sequence," Thurber said.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on October 14, 2023. It has since been updated.