Angelina Jolie

The actress tells the truth about leopards, late-night chats with Billy Bob, and her new villainous phase.

By Fred Schruers
Photographed by James White

Earlier on in her career, notably as Girl, Interrupted’s entertainingly feral Lisa, we tended to think of Angelina Jolie as dangerous. These days, we’re more inclined to think of her as unafraid. Perhaps that’s because she has stayed on her own course despite career reversals (2003’s Beyond Borders was one from the heart that flopped; this year’s Taking Lives was one for the bucks that did likewise) and shown a knack for calmly living out personal traumas (her feuding with her dad, her tumultuous breakup with Billy Bob Thornton) in public.

In recent months, the tabloid press has tried to link her with both costar Colin Farrell and director Oliver Stone as she shot Alexander, rumors she laughingly addresses below. Farrell calls her “a very special woman who brought an amazing, otherworldly energy to [her role],” and Stone calls her “ravishing—out of this world,” but off-camera, Jolie, 29, is very much of this world: grounded, cordially workmanlike, and, for all the exoticism of her looks, a clear-eyed, articulate presence.

Though she’s a woman who’s proven very adept at flying through the air on cables in slam-bang action sequences, Jolie is more striking, and all the more herself, in moments of stillness. At the afternoon photo shoot on a locked-down soundstage in Queens, she used that remarkable stillness wisely. She was pure aplomb in dealing with a wall of flame (see cover), and if anything, was even calmer when two elegant but fearsome-looking leopards were brought in by their handlers.

PREMIERE had proposed that in keeping with our notion of Jolie as a woman not prone to intimidation, we would have some kind of potentially predatory creature on hand. We proposed dogs; Jolie countered with the wish for wild animals, thus the leopard. A couple of hours later, in a hotel dining room on Central Park South, with her three-year-old adopted son, Maddox, sleeping upstairs, and police cruisers noisily running drills outside, our talk begins with the big cat.

PREMIERE: The crew on today’s shoot was amazed at how comfortable you seemed with your costar.
I was very honored when [the handlers] said she was so comfortable sitting at my feet. They said I have cat karma, whatever that is. I think they can tell if somebody’s scared of them or isn’t comfortable. I see women, myself, people, just free, open, one with nature and the elements. That’s where I’m coming to in my life now. So it was actually refreshing, much easier than trying to put me in a dress and make me stand on a podium. [laughing] I’d rather be with a leopard.

Given certain precautions . . .
Everybody was told not to be at crouching level next to them and not to surprise them . . . go really slow, don’t hold eye contact, and then go around. Maybe it’s being a woman, because as soon as you were around them, you almost wanted to start talking baby talk—it looks like it’s a little baby. I have so much respect for wild animals. One of my favorite quotes is, “I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself.”

You have said that your film roles over recent years have tended to reflect your own philosophical growth offscreen.
The [upcoming] few [roles] may be considered dark women or wild, especially Alexander’s mother, but I suppose what I’m saying is that you just try to evolve, to figure out the things that I’m connecting to as I’m growing up.

As Olympias, you are raped by your husband in front of your son, the young Alexander, and then play a mystically dark part in events that later unfold. You initially felt you weren’t likely to take the part?
I wanted to enjoy the script, meet with Oliver, enjoy saying hi. Then I read her first scene and just fell in love with her. I love anything that deals with the struggle of the self and where your responsibility lies in the world. Oliver and Colin [Farrell] and I joked about it, looking at Colin and saying, “Could I be his mom?”And it’s weird, but I think that Oliver cast who he felt had the essence of the person, and I’m grateful to him for that.

You were able to forget that when you arrived on this film, you and Colin were both about 28 years old?
He surprised me his first day when he had this wide-eyed youth, and he made himself younger when I made myself older. That I could feel maternally toward him shows what a great actor he is.

So was there a sense of all the “bad kids” assembling to put on the school play—except the most rambunctious one in the room just may be the teacher, in other words, Stone?
What I found very interesting was that people told me these crazy things about Colin before I met him, and crazy things about Oliver [although] I knew him a bit, crazy things about Val [Kilmer], everybody’s got the craziest reputation. And I’m sure they’d heard crazy things about me. I found them to be the most sensitive, supportive group of people that I’ve ever worked with. Truly sensitive, and maybe that’s why everybody comes across as being such a badass [laughing]; there is an openness and vulnerability that’s just raw and out there that tends to be misinterpreted.

This is an epic done with a modern kind of psychology, with Stone probing into what demons made Alexander into a hero. Is there some risk in that Stone has been more of a target than an icon lately?
You can criticize the type of films he makes and the themes that they touch on, but you can’t dispute the fact that he understands those themes; whether you like his meaning or not, he’s a filmmaker. Those people who criticize him have not really set foot in half the life he has. . . . He’s kind of haunted by things. He has a mind that’s overwhelmed by things.

The press wanted to link you with costar Colin Farrell, and they ran pictures of the two of you and Maddox in Egypt touring the Pyramids.
I work with a refugee agency, and I went to visit and he came with me. We also went to the Pyramids. I think the world of Colin, so I could be paired with somebody worse. I think that he and I both know that it makes sense that we would be put as a couple because we’re very similar—we’re almost the same person in many ways, both so free and so wild and yet very focused on family and a lot of the other things in common . We’re almost too similar. But yeah, we kind of got it. We kind of had the same thought. [laughs]

I think we’re both not the relationship kind of person right now, something we’ve both been open about. But we’re also very professional, whether people believe it or not. You know, I’m his mother. [laughs] And we had a great—we became very, very close, but didn’t start dating.

Val Kilmer said, with a wink, that he had a crush on you. He added that everybody on the film did, including the camels.
He was asked about [his character], and Val said, “We’re a married couple.” I thought, God, I love that he keeps going “a married couple” when we’re the worst married couple in history.

Jumping into Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow fits your interest in piloting airplanes [Jolie recently took flying lessons]. The challenge was to do your acting in front of a blue screen, for first-time director Kerry Conran.
Kerry is the soul of it. I blame him and Jude [Law] for dragging me into it.

I’ve known Jude forever; he was at my wedding when I married Johnny [Lee Miller]. They showed me this five-minute reel of what it could be, and I was just blown away by the art of it. Actors so often interact with all this new technology, and we’re not sure if it offends us, if it’s taking over. And this was an example of how it actually can be used in a wonderful way. The artist in me was woken up by it, and then they explained my character. It was one of those, “Awww, I’ll just go for it and try something.”

A sexy, eye-patched fighter ace from Sky Captain’s hidden history.
I still have my eye-patch. I love my eye-patch and my leather boots. I loved her . . . just a great, fun character. Very British, ex-R.A.F.

I’m a secret from the past. But at the end of the day, I think that she’s just a serious professional. We tried to throw in a backstory, you know, how she lost her eye. We thought I lost it coming in and out of a prison camp. But I always assumed she used to be a very reckless pilot. That she . . . drank too much, slept around . . . She was just out-of-her-mind wild, and then she lost her eye and ended up taking life too seriously, which is where we meet her. When you meet her, she’s like a weird cross between a dominatrix and Winston Churchill.

I love Churchill. I have every book on him. I listen to his speeches on tape—the last great orator and statesman, and his painting and his bricklaying and his gardening and his marriage. He’s one of the founders of the United Nations and is a reminder—I’ve sort of come around to this point in life where as corny as it may sound, you start to think about, what was the intention behind the United Nations? Behind the Constitution? Behind America? What was it supposed to be? And how is America supposed to be? Because everyone’s gotten negative, and I’ve had my own very negative feeling toward my own country, not understanding it these days.

Your U.N. High Commission on Refugees work has given you some perspective on the costs of war.
I don’t think it’s news to anybody that a mistake was made in Vietnam and possibly in Iraq now, in that we don’t learn about a situation and a people before we decide to intervene. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t intervene, it’s just we need to absolutely know who these people are, totally understand a culture.

How do I teach Maddox about what happened in his country, Cambodia? I didn’t learn about Pol Pot when I went to school. America had a hand in the [conflict]; how do I explain that?

One of your U.N. colleagues described your willingness to set off on a six-hour motorcycle trip on a rutted dirt road with no promise of any creature comforts or even safety.
I’ve done a bunch of trips. I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world. I love being allowed to go and be that connected to real life. I wouldn’t feel comfortable being around that kind of suffering if I was in the lap of luxury. I go in and out, and there are great field officers who are there every day; they’re the amazing ones. I feel lucky to join them for a few days or a week, because it connects me to what’s real about life. There are beautiful families and amazing people out there helping them, and it is nice to be around that, especially in the business I’m in.

There came a moment on an airplane after one such trip—leafing through fashion magazines—when you realized you had grown alienated from the life you were living?
It was a rude awakening for me, to go from the roots of a situation where I saw such real life to seeing “beautiful people” and lots of money, and you should buy this and you need this and here’s how to get this surgery to look like this and . . . You just think, my God, what are we saying? I’d love to encourage more kids to travel to these places, get out of their environments. We’ve got teenagers who are worrying about what label they’ve got on, and they can do all that, but it would be great if they could realize [more] also.

Yet you’re an icon, and a 14-year-old girl might look at the cover of a magazine and say, “I could be like her.”
And I hope that she, if she does, if she listens to my interviews, doesn’t think, “I want to be her, I want to have a big house.” Because I’ve seen specials on myself where they’re like, “Here’s the house she lives in . . . this is where she sleeps, this is what she eats, what she buys, where she purchases her makeup,” and none of it was right.

It makes you think, wouldn’t it be more helpful for a young girl to know of the healthy habits I have? Of the things I’ve discovered, the mistakes I’ve made, of how human I am, and how like her I am? That’s more interesting than, “Here is how much stuff she has and how fabulous her life is,” which really doesn’t encourage anything except people feeling bad about their own lives . I don’t get it.

You’ve gone through some stuff, a pretty tough breakup . . .
Which one? [laughs]

Great answer. More recently, with the Billy Bob marriage, there was an intense focus on you two.
My relationship with Billy . . . absolutely. Nobody actually knows, but Billy and I speak now. We began a few months ago with one of the most beautiful conversations two people could have. We talked about how much we said and didn’t really mean. Why we wed, what insecurities motivated certain things, what smallness of ourselves led to certain mistakes in the road and really at the end of the day, what you call somebody, whether it’s a wife, a husband, a friend—whether you own somebody and feel they’re absolutely yours means absolutely nothing.

There was so much you two willingly let the public know that it must be hard to find your way back to a private resolution.
At the end of the day, we’re friends and we know why we came together and we know why we separated, but we also know that we have a deep understanding of each other’s pain and human qualities and we have a history. . . . So yeah, we have this amazing—we talked and we sat up at night, because you can imagine how he is and how I am, we both analyze life to a . . . crazy thing. We analyzed everything we went through and why, and we sat up and we cried together and we talked for a long time, face-to-face.

That’s amazing; the bitterness seemed as strong as the romance had been.
We ended up realizing that we’re connected in life for life, and whoever is the first to be on their deathbed, we’ll be there for the other and be a friend. And I feel the same way about my first husband. We know each other and we have a deep history. I think you have to get past any kind of smallness that somebody did, or something you expect from them, or some angry, stupid words— that if that person can admit what motivated those stupid words, then you can move on.

Did that reexamination answer lingering questions?
I wouldn’t want to try to explain it without him here, but we’re both full-feeling, emotional people, and our lives were changing. Our separating was the best thing that could happen; I’m grateful to him for setting me free to be a mom and to travel and to do the things that I want to do.

Do you still feel it might have been different if he’d been there for you in adopting Maddox, and for your causes?
I think his heart is in the right place and everybody has different abilities. I travel to New Zealand, I can be in the middle of nowhere, I can eat bugs and I can put my kid on my back, and I can live a wild life. That’s not his nature. That doesn’t mean that I’m a better person; it means we have a very different nature.

The question becomes, how do you find that guy that wants to go on these ventures with you, to take those risks?
[laughing] I’ll know it when I see him, but I don’t expect him to come along anytime soon. It’s hard.

I had kind of a not sad—well, maybe sad—but an acceptance of who I am as a woman and that maybe who I am as a woman isn’t somebody that can be the great partner and wife and also do the things that I want to do, be as dedicated and as in love with that world as I am—maybe I was more in love with the world than [with] my husbands. And my dedication was more to people I didn’t know than to my own husbands, and that’s a lesson I have to learn and face. And could I ever find a partner that understands that kind of focus outward and not inside your own home?

I’ve come to realize there’s a very strong possibility I might be raising my children by myself and have great lovers and friends, but not find that one great love. And that’s sad, you know. But better that than hurt somebody or go through another divorce.

You’re looking at it with an unusual degree of consideration.
Yeah, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to be leaving for a trip with a backpack on, with Mad, and see somebody standing at the door.

There’s a little thing called an acting career, running around the globe and what’s more, being on a global stage.
So yeah, you can meet somebody with that same passion, but then do you end up with that person or . . . ? I don’t know. Often my life is such a mix of things. I’m not just that person that travels; I’m also an actor and my life is public and that’s not an easy thing. If I happen to find that person works in a field in Manila, doing good things, then what? Bring them into this world where they’re photographed and picked apart and analyzed?

So, it’s not something I’m counting on finding, but watching Maddox growing up without a father—he’s growing up great, so really that’s the only thing I need to be thinking about.

Has he betrayed any longings for that?
He watches cartoons, and he understands that there’s a mama and a dada. He was watching something the other day and he said, “Mama, where’s dada?” I was really paranoid, I was really quiet, and I said, “Mad, who’s dada?” And he said, “Mama.” [laughs]

Marriage is challenging enough in real life, but it appears that in Mr and Mrs. Smith, you and screen husband Brad Pitt have something even more dangerous going on.
When you meet us, we’re in therapy because we have a very bad marriage. We don’t really know each other, and so we have this very bizarre, comic relationship. We bicker as you do after six years of marriage. Often you brush [your] teeth next to each other, you go to bed, you go to work, and have no idea who the person is you’re living next to. So after years of marriage, they discover that they are both hit men and that they’re from enemy agencies as spies. And then they have to kill each other.

So everything is a metaphor for marriage, for every time you’ve said to your spouse, “I’m going to kill you” [laughs] or “I wish I could strangle you”—they go to that extreme. We have some pretty big fights. But in the end, it’s a very positive, pro-marriage [laughs] movie.

You have a love scene with Brad?
Yeah. We have many . . . we have one and it travels.

So it travels, in time?
No, it just travels through the house.

Once again the tabloids were insisting you were having a relationship with your costar.
[shaking her head] Every time I do a film, I’m bound to be in the news dating my costar. I heard recently that I’m dating Oliver, which I didn’t mind, I thought that was kind of fantastic, because—my mom saw it, and she said there was a whole thing on why we’d be great together, because we both have Asian children or something. [laughs] And I thought what a bizarre stretch of the imagination, but you know . . .

In recent years your relations with your father, Jon Voight, have been rocky. Any chance of a rapprochement?
No. My father and I don’t speak. I don’t hold any anger toward him. I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, and families are earned

When I had the final argument/disappointment with my father—we’ve had many off and on—I had thought we were breaking ground, and I realized we simply weren’t. We were back to where we always were, not a place where I felt healthy or good when I was around him. And it’s simply that. There’s no anger. I feel for him. I feel if he’s got problems, maybe he thinks I do. We all do, maybe, but the amount of tears shed growing up, and the amount of screaming matches and the amount of insecurities seen [impacting] on my mother and my brother because of fights and things said is simply not healthy.

I have to be strong for my son, and I don’t want to have in his environment something that upsets me and makes his mother not as strong. So it’s simple—no negative feelings, it is just not healthy for me to have that contact with my father.

In Shark Tale, you play a fish called Lola. How do you inhabit that?
One, it’s just fun to go to work in your pajamas with no makeup on. It’s also really weird that the other actors are not there, because if they’re [later] improvising something really great, then I have to go back and respond.

But it’s funny to see yourself as a fish. They showed me the pictures of all the different fish, and I saw my fish, and it was so apparent to me very quickly that that was my fish. [laughs]

When I first went in, I was doing a bunch of voices; after a while, they explained that the whole point was that they liked my voice and thought it suited her. I’m one of those people—you hear your voice in a machine, ooh, I sound weird. So I was really flattered. I have a kid now, so he can watch Shark Tale. Even though Mommy is the bad fish, I think he’ll like Mommy’s fish.

You’ve always said your roles have always related to something going on in your life. So what’s that all about?
Somebody said recently, you’ve played these heroes like Lara [in Tomb Raider] and in Beyond Borders. And now World of Tomorrow is a bit of a hero, but she’s also a bit psychotic, and Olympias in Alexander, they’re slightly villainous. I’m going through a villainous period of my life.

The folks at the UNHCR seem to feel differently. They say you’ve made a big difference in bringing awareness to refugee issues they deal with. There’s a certain maturity in that.
I think probably the same part of me that’s starting to go to Washington, to go on the Hill and fight to push a bill forward, is the same thing in me that’s getting more grounded in stepping up and being strong. There’s a certain kind of adult confidence, of centered strength, that I probably didn’t have when I was more wired and wild. I think you naturally as a parent have that. Everybody always said to me, “Do you feel softer as a mother?” and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I didn’t have anything to kill for three years ago.

It’s hard-wired, yes? You would kill or die.
In a second. You’ve made some kind of pact, with the universe or whatever it is, to live for this other person. To give your life for this person.

I never assumed I would feel like a mother . . . [rather] I would be a little different, but it wouldn’t matter because we could be friends in this life and take care of each other. But if Mad almost falls, or I think he’s hurt himself, I get this shock of nerves and fevers in my body that I’ve never known in my life. And we’re not genetically related, but clearly that thing is possible. I was surprised that this little person that I met across the world would have this profound effect on me.

You go from being the person that has the cry and says, “Is it going to be okay?” to immediately you’re the person who says, “It’s going to be fine, sweetheart. No problem. Don’t worry.”

And you vow that no harm will ever befall them . . .
My whole life, there will be something—I had a girlfriend say about someone, “He’s not my type, he’s Asian,” referring to some guy, and my heart hurt at the thought of, “Oh my God, is my son, because he’s of a certain ethnicity, not going to be some girl’s type and that’s going to break his heart one day?” This was just a girlfriend chatting, but it was so painful to me—that moment of, oh, God, life is going to hit him one day.

[But] it hits all of us and he’ll be fine. It’s my job to make him strong and confident and happy and complete as a human being, so that he bounces right back.

How does the family life affect on your choice of roles?
It’s got to be something special enough to take me away from my family.

I loved shooting Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but five months not being able to travel and doing the other things I also love to do . . . ? I couldn’t do United Nations stuff, and I also couldn’t be in a new environment with Maddox or learn about a new culture—I live for that stuff. I don’t live for making a movie. It’s becoming hard for me to spend five months just doing that with my life. I never thought I would say that. I always loved acting so much. I thought that was my whole life.

You took a shot at joining the two diverging pursuits with Beyond Borders. Were you stung by the cold reception?
I know everybody involved in that, truly our hearts were in the right place—to bring those issues to light and even to have people discuss it, positive or negative. I’ll always be sad that there isn’t an openness toward that. I think for people to go out of their way to attack films that are attempting social comment makes a case for, in the future, a lack of those kinds of films.

You seem to make a point of getting out there and greeting the fans up close. What is it like when you go out in the street?
It’s fine. I took Mad for a carriage ride earlier. I think celebrity or any kind of weird line in between you and people is only created by people that put walls around themselves. Every once in a while there’s somebody following you with a camera, or someone asks you to sign something or says hi, and the day you stop being grateful for that, there’s something wrong with you.

And yet you said earlier you related to the leopard in captivity.
I have a respect for all things wild. Two minutes into the shoot, you see this little creature, she had lovely eyes, with the leash on in a strange room, and I immediately feel for her, because I feel like her. [laughs] You’re surrounded by lights flashing in your face and a bunch of people you don’t know and big, cardboard walls around you, and you just want to go outside and run around. You see anything wild and caged and . . . I just felt for her.