Jennifer Aniston and Christoph Waltz don't seem like the most obvious of co-stars – and the sequel to the 2011 bad-taste comedy Horrible Bosses seems a particularly unlikely film for them to share the billing.
Certainly their roads to big-screen fame could not be more different. Aniston, of course, is the all-American actress who became an overnight success as one of the young stars of the hit 1990s sitcom Friends.
Waltz is a veteran Austrian actor who finally came knocking on Hollywood’s door in 2009, after almost three decades as a jobbing actor in Europe – and within four years had won two Oscars.
Yet here they are together in the cast of Horrible Bosses 2, which opens today.
Aniston reprises her role as a sex-crazed dentist from the first film – one of the three horrible bosses of the title that downtrodden employees Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day plotted to murder.
This time, they hatch a kidnapping scheme when their plans to become amateur entrepreneurs are dealt a blow by a conniving investor.
Aniston, 45, says she pushed the boundaries with her character as far as she could in the sequel – but would like to try to go even further in a third instalment.
The actors improvised a lot during filming, Aniston says, until it became a gross-out contest between the stars.
“This one went into a territory that I think just wasn’t even funny,” she said. “I couldn’t even make it dirty funny. It was just bad dirty.”
When it came to developing her character, Aniston said she told the filmmakers to “just go as far as you can until someone actually gets sick from it”.
Yet she feels like there’s a lot more mileage in the character of Dr Julia Harris.
“She’s hardly tapped out,” Aniston says. “We all were a bit sad when this movie came to an end because I, for one, felt it was too soon to end Julia’s party.”
Although Aniston is perhaps seen only as a lightweight, romantic comedy actress by most, she has also been attracting some awards buzz for her role in the upcoming drama Cake, in which she stars as a woman who becomes fascinated by the suicide of someone from her chronic-pain support group.
But the 45-year-old actress said she tries not to get caught up in awards-season hype.
“It’s flattering, it’s humbling, it’s exciting, whatever, to even be in that conversation, so to speak, so I think that’s just a win in itself,” she says.
Waltz, meanwhile, is no stranger to awards, winning the biggest movie gong of them all not once, but twice. And another landmark honour will be bestowed upon him on Monday, when he receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Not bad for a boy from Vienna. Yet, despite his astonishing recent success, the 58-year-old insists life is no simpler now he’s on the A-list.
“This is a fight ... life isn’t easier now with two Oscars,” he says. Cultivated, attentive and with a piercing gaze, Waltz is nonetheless enjoying the fruits of his success.
His career began in 1979 in his native Austria, after catching the showbiz bug from his parents – his mother Elisabeth was a costume designer and father Johannes a stage builder.
His grandparents were actors, and he followed them by studying at the Max Reinhart Seminar at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, followed by a stint at the celebrated Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York.
After making his debut on TV, for years he combined work on the small screen with film and theatre in Europe.
“I really was constantly moving from countries, places, mentalities, languages,” he said. “You move out as a young man, you conquer this and conquer that.”
Conscious that the German language was limiting his choices, he decided to travel to London and Paris, where he said he “discovered tourism of a very, very high level”.
“I discovered the place to live really is where you do what you do, with the people you like to do it with. And this place is here, of course,” he said, referring to Hollywood.
His most important new friend in Los Angeles was Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker with “unorthodox methods of navigation”, according to Waltz.
The Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction director gave Waltz the "gift" of his two most famous roles so far: as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and doctor King Schultz in Django Unchained (2012).
In both cases he won the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, awards that catapulted him into the Hollywood elite.
Winning the awards “is an honour, it’s flattering, and a wonderful thing to be awarded”, he says. “But yet, you have to keep doing what you do, and try to do it well. Keep fighting for getting good roles. That’s all it is about.”
Of performing comedy, he says: “As long as you take it seriously, you can do it. But in a movie, because comedy is so much timing and rhythm, all of that is most established in editing.
“I can say a complete straight sentence, just neutral and straight, and a good editor can turn it into a funny or sad thing. Because that’s the beauty of movies, nothing works in itself.”
Over his long career Waltz admits he has had a few horrible bosses.
“I had more than horrible – abusive, degrading, really brutal, bad directors,” he says. “Now it would be different because I would tell them to get lost.”
