Aaron Peasley

While she’s often the subject of tabloid headlines (usually portrayed as a man-eating femme fatale), there’s a whole other side to Angelina Jolie. Sizzling star one minute, the next she’s a doting mother, UN ambassador, philanthropist and, just lately, pilot.

Angelina Jolie is surprisingly chatty for someone who was up till five this morning shooting pick-up shots for her latest film, the action comedy Mr and Mrs Smith. Wearing little, if any, makeup and dressed casually in a black knit top, low-slung jeans and high heels, Jolie in person is thinner and smaller than expected, but the superlatives used endlessly to describe her beauty are definitely justified. The actress’s lips form that famous pout as she begins talking about love and how she has never been truly in love. “I’ve cared about people, I’ve loved people,” she says. “But what I’ve come to understand is that being in love is something I’ve never had. Now that I have an idea of what it is, I might find it, not I’m not counting on it. What I look for now are people who I can have an adventure with. I get excited when I meet a man I have no sexual attraction to, a man who is doing an amazing project in the middle of another country.”

Jolie probably wished she was on a desert island with said man when speculation broke about an on-set romance with her Mr and Mrs Smith co-star, Brad Pitt. You could say it was a tabloid certainty that rumours of a romantic relationship between two of Hollywood’s sexiest stars would surface during filming, with the paparazzi even taking photographs of the co-stars being “intimate” on set. However, what was not expected was the official announcement during shooting that Pitt and his wife of four-and-a-half years, Jennifer Aniston, had separated. “I get rumoured to be with everyone I work with,” says Jolie wryly, most likely referring to her Taking Lives co-star, Olivier Martinez (according to the tabloids, Kylie Minogue made an emergency dash to the Canadian set to wrench him from Jolie’s clutches.)

For Jolie, the timing of the Pitt-Aniston announcement was unfortunate. What began as standard gossip fodder became a media frenzy, in which each party in the alleged love triangle took on a public persona worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. After the Kidman-Cruise split, Pitt and Aniston’s marriage was, after all, Tinseltown’s matrimonial great white hope in an industry notorious for failed marriages. Jolie was cast as the black widow – a man-eating femme fatale with a repertoire of wiles irresistible to any red-blooded man – the antithesis of Aniston’s girl-next-door sorority-sister persona. And Pitt, of course, escaped scrutiny. Jolie became the woman most likely to steal your husband.

Surely, it must sadden her that she was implicated in a marital break-up, high-profile or otherwise. “I’ve been dragged into a whole bunch of bulls**t, but it doesn’t really hurt me,” she says. “I think that stuff is sad for anybody involved but I have absolutely no involvement in the situation… and there are people who are going through something really heavy – I feel sadness for them. It’s a time for everyone to be sensitive.” It seems Jolie and Pitt were being sensitive to the situation when they were photographed at a safe distance apart just days before this interview. Jolie says it wasn’t a conscious decision and that they “are friends”, before adding that she would “rather not answer these questions.”
Mr and Mrs Smith was always going to be one hot ticket. Starring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars and directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity), the film’s plot follows Jane and John Smith, a suburban couple, whose six-year marriage has become passionless and isolating in its humdrum familiarity. The years have made them strangers to each other and both become domestic control freaks to distract themselves from the real problem – that, despite being married, they simply don’t know each other. The parody emerges as we discover both husband and wife are deadly assassins working for rival agencies, ultimately ending up on each others hit list.

If the tabloid press is to be believed, neither of Jolie’s previous marriages, first to British actor Jonny Lee Miller and then to actor Billy Bob Thornton (you know, they wore phials of each other’s blood), bear any similarity to the Smiths’ mundane celluloid marriage. Jolie says that is not the case. “If anything, [the film] was uncomfortable because I had too much to relate to,” she laughs. “I have two failed marriages in my life – how to work out a relationship and be a partner is something that I just don’t know how to do.” Has she ever seen a therapist, as her character does? “I should have, but no, never.” She says that when her marriage to Thornton was crumbling, “they tried to make us go, but we didn’t.”

As in most areas of her life, Jolie also applies her trademark no-regrets approach to fashion. She has always marched to the beat of her own drum and is perhaps the only A-lister whose fashion choices are genuinely hers. “I have fun with all that stuff… I can go from one side of my personality to the other. If I am going to get dressed up for something, I can enjoy it and have fun with it, maybe because I am doing so many different characters, it becomes almost like a costume, and I love that.”
In Oscar fashion annals, Jolie would certainly warrant two entries: the first for her black Versace Morticia Addams gown, in which she accepted the 2000 best supporting actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted. “That night, I was just thinking, ‘My hair is black, so I’ll get a black dress that fits.’” Jolie has said of the memorable night when she also kissed her brother, James Haven, quite, um, passionately. The second would be the white Dolce & Gabanna pantsuit she wore the following year – the polar opposite of the black dress.

Red-carpet outings are now less of a priority for Jolie since she adopted her son, Maddox Chivan Jolie, from a Cambodian orphanage in 2002. Mad – as Jolie calls him – was on set for last night’s filming. “We were shooting up a 99-cent store and he just sat at the monitors with his headphones on and watched Mommy blow things up,” she says, as if this is a perfectly normal evening for a toddler. But then, not many three-year-olds have mohawks either. When Jolie talks about her son, her eyes flicker. She says he’s had a profound effect on her. “Mad has made me soft. He made me understand something about myself, someone who is capable of singing a lullaby, and able to make him stop crying. Tenderness that I never had a place for suddenly came out. He has also made me fiercer – I would kill somebody to protect him. I didn’t know that kind of love before.”

Asked where home is, Jolie seems genuinely flummoxed. “I don’t know,” she ponders, her lips again forming that pout. “I don’t consider anywhere home really. We go to England, where Mad is in school, and we have a place in Cambodia, which is kind of Mad’s home – I consider that his place.” It was recently reported that Jolie had adopted another child, a Russian orphan named Gleb, and while she says this is untrue, she adds that she does hope to adopt more children. “I’d love to in the next year, I think. We’ll see how we balance, and then we’ll take it from there. Though I could go to an orphanage tomorrow and see triplets, so who knows?”

So how does a young, potentially expanding family move between such disparate worlds: a late-night, shoot-‘em-up film set, to domestic down time in Buckinghamshire, to the Cambodian jungle? “Sometimes, I am hanging upside down from something or running around, sliding across a floor and I do think, ‘This is so bizarre, I am someone’s mother!’” Jolie laughs. “And it does feel a bit extreme when you live in these different worlds, but I’m just glad I understand the balance now. It’s not hard because I feel like I am always a mom now and I just do a job that I like and I am very grateful for.”
Jolie says her sense of perspective came in 2001, when she travelled to war-torn Africa. “Seeing the situation in Sierra Leone completely changed me as a person. I never wanted to forget the profound understanding of human needs and the suffering and quest for survival. I knew then that it was more of what I should be connecting with. Years ago, when I was just an actress, I felt really imbalanced. I felt like I had no purpose. Why do I matter? Why the focus on me? Why am I on the cover of magazines?” Since that watershed year, Jolie has become a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and has travelled to more than 15 of the world’s poorest and grimmest countries, often at her own expense. She recently confirmed reports that she has donated one third of her income to humanitarian causes (she commands US $12 million per picture).

Earlier this year, Jolie went to US congress on a mission to highlight refugee issues and raise money. Here, she confronted a relatively unfamiliar emotion: fear. “I was scared to death. I had to wear a suit and take all my briefing notes. I was just thinking, ‘I’m the only person with a tattoo here. I’m just a punk kid at heart – what am I doing here?’” she recalls. “But I have found that if you care about something and if you are genuine about it, and have invested the time, then you have a place, even if it’s in the middle of Washington!”

Jolie’s adroit efforts in diplomacy and advocacy have led to speculation that she could eventually pursue a political career. While she recently dismissed it by casually saying, “I have too many skeletons in my closet for that”, she is now less sure. “I keep saying no, but then I keep getting more involved. I’m still trying to understand politics – it’s more complicated than Hollywood!” Given the choice between her humanitarian efforts and her film career, she nominates the former, without hesitation. “I just feel like it’s the more important thing to do with my life.”

There’s no doubt that Jolie’s life has become one great big juggling act. Being a single mother with a prolific workload, does it concern her that Maddox doesn’t have a father? “I never had a father,” says Jolie, whose tempestuous relationship with her Oscar-winning dad, Jon Voight (her mother is French actress Marcheline Bertrand), has been widely documented. “That’s not to say that he doesn’t need one. I think for a boy to have a man who is committed to him, who loves him, and supports him, would be wonderful. But it’s better to have nobody than to have someone who pretends to be a father or disappears on him.”

While having a child has changed Jolie’s approach to a lot of things, it hasn’t inspired her to bury the hatchet with Voight (who infamously questioned Jolie’s fitness for motherhood and accused her of having “serious mental problems”). “Having a child has made me make damn sure that I don’t have people in my life who are damaging to me, because I want to be strong for my kid. I want him to only be around people who love him and support him and his mother.”

So, besides the politicians on Capitol Hill, is there anything Angelina Jolie is afraid of? “My only fear is that something is going to happen to my son, or something is going to happen to me and take me away from him… but I don’t feel fear very often,” she says. “I should have more fear. It would probably make me a better pilot.” Yes, between her film commitments, UN work and being a mother, Jolie has found time to become a certified pilot; she shares her passion for flying with her son. “I am still at the beginning stages. There are moments when I go through my checks and I forget to adjust a few things because I’m not focused, I think, ‘I’ll just get up there,’” she laughs. “I love flying, it’s freedom.”
So maybe Jolie really is Lara Croft? Asked if men are intimidated when they meet the action hero in the flesh, the actress begins to laugh. “Maybe I’d like to think that is why I am single but once anyone gets to know me they realise that I’m not like that. I can be a bit distant because I am protective as a person and it takes a little while to get to know me emotionally.”

Turning 30 in June, it would seem that Jolie is in a good place. While she maintains that her life is still “insane”, you get the feeling she’s finally in the captain’s seat and content to be flying solo.
As one of Hollywood’s busiest women, she has also discovered the ability to remain both inside and outside the Hollywood machine, though sometimes those worlds do intersect. Jolie recalls a time she was in the middle of the Congo on a UN trip when some young boys recognised her from Tomb Raider and asked her to do some of her stunts. “I couldn’t,” she laughs. “I’d disappoint them. I’m just a skinny odd little mum.”