Jennifer Aniston on the biggest against-type role of her career in ‘Cake’

Several actresses got big nominations this year for playing ailing, self-destructive, even suicidal women in the throes of soul-scraping emotional distress.

But only one of them went there directly from "Horrible Bosses 2."

That would be Jennifer Aniston, nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for her work as a depressed, pain-wracked woman in "Cake," wherein she makes one of the biggest against-type leaps in modern movie history.

Straight to "Cake" from "HB2," also from "We're the Millers" and "Just Go With It," and before that a couple dozen romcoms in which Aniston displayed the gift for light comedy that dates all the way back "Friends," if not quite as far as "Leprechaun."

She knew people would wonder if she could do it — but Aniston had a more immediate question.

"I wondered to myself, can you do this?" she told the Daily News in a phone interview earlier this week.

"I'd had opportunities in some darker, independent movies to do things that were more serious, but for me this was a big deal. This was such a creative leap, such a huge challenge, physically and emotionally."

She plays Claire, a car-crash survivor dealing with grief and pain beyond the reach of therapy or drugs, though she seriously abuses the latter, and herself, even as she drives away those closest to her.

"The role was so different that I really felt like I went back to acting class. I really worked through the details of the character, because it was so important to me that there not be a false note. How many painkillers could a woman like Claire take? How would it make her behave? I really wanted everything to ring true, and I wanted to represent this character honestly."

"Cake" opens wide in theaters today, but Aniston's already been approached by people afflicted with chronic pain, happy the movie brings some understanding to their ordeal.

But she cautions that "Cake" is not principally an issue movie. It emerges as a kind of offbeat love story between Claire and her housekeeper (Adriana Barraza), the one person who seems able to withstand Claire's compulsive need to lash out.

"When you meet Claire, she's in just an awful state, and we're asking the audience to come with us on this journey to understand this woman, who's SUCH a pain and SUCH a bitch, and there next to her is this angel, and I think immediately the audience starts to wonder: why is this woman by her side?"

The movie works to overturn cliches about privileged Claire and her Latina maid by making socioeconomic disparities between them the subject of their relationship.

"That's one of the things I loved so much about the script. The way it was honest about race and class, the unique way their friendship grows out of an employer-employee relationship," Aniston said.

The two women do a fair amount of sparring, some of it bleakly funny, so in a way Aniston was not completely out of her element.

"There are aspects of comedy woven throughout, and you get a glimpse of the women she used to be, funny and strong, and now just sarcastic and bitter, who's just sort of given up. She's stuck."

As was Aniston, "stuck" in comedy, though the idea that after these long years she's finally "acting" causes her to rise to the defense of comedians everywhere.

"I find it a little puzzling, like I'm kind of scratching my head, because I know how hard comedy is, how hard timing is. I mean, good comedy is really hard.

"Bad comedy is not hard. Because it's bad."

Still, she's gobsmacked by her SAG nomination, coming, as it does, from her colleagues in the acting field.

"That just blew me out of the water. That means almost more to me than anything, to know I have that kind respect from my peers. I'm truly humbled, and it means a lot."

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