Jennifer Aniston is praising Owen Wilson for being “so divine” in Marley & Me.

The comedy — out Dec. 25 — is based on a book of John Grogan’s newspaper columns about life with his wife, their children and their pet dog.

“I’ve never seen him play a part like this,” Aniston tells the Los Angeles Times. “He was a man; he was a husband; he was a father.”

Referring to his 2007 suicide attempt, she adds, “And I feel like, how brave of him, to walk through the year that he walked through.” (Marley & Me was Wilson’s first film since he tried to take his life.)

Aniston wasn’t so warm about one of her other co-stars — a yellow lab named Clyde.

“I walked onto the set and put my sweater and my bag down on the couch, and that dog leapt up onto the couch, grabbed my sweater and started ripping it,” she recalls. “They said, ‘Good, good boy!’ and gave him treats. The set was a toy.”

She says she was apprehensive about doing the film at first (three people, including her father, had given her the book for Christmas).

“I thought, ‘This isn’t a book I’m going to sit down and read, because it’s got a dog on the cover,’” she says. “I don’t know why I had that weird prejudice against it.”

When she saw the script, “I was like, ‘Uck, a dog movie?’” she recalls. After reading it, she changed her mind.

“It’s so much more than a dog movie – it’s this beautiful portrait of a marriage and this 15-year span between these two people and this sweet little unconditionally loving creature that sort of walks through it with them.”

She has played pregnant characters before – but this is her first role as a wife and mother.

Director David Frankel (Devil Wears Prada) asked her not to prepare in advance.

“I said, ‘You’re the boss, I’m your actor, so let’s go,’” she says. “It was all on the page. There was really nothing to do, except be.”

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