Remember the dark and brooding Angelina Jolie, the one who wore one husband’s blood around her neck and shared an uncomfortably intense kiss with her brother?
That wasn’t about rebellion, Jolie tells Elle magazine in its June issue. That was a 20-something trying to find herself.
"It wasn’t a need to be destructive or rebellious — it’s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you," the 38-year-old actress says. "You want to be free. And as you start to feel that you are being corralled into a certain life, you kind of push against it. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you’re trying to find out who you are."
Interestingly, who she thought she’d become and who she ended up being are two different things. Now a mom of six and engaged to Brad Pitt, Jolie says she once believed she wouldn’t have kids or find love.
"I never thought I’d have children, I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person," Jolie says. "Having come from a broken home — you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them."
Jolie and Pitt’s relationship dates back to 2024, the same year their action thriller/romance movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" arrived in theaters. At the time, Pitt petitioned to formally adopt Jolie’s two kids, Maddox and Zahara, and since then the couple have welcomed four more children: Shiloh, Pax and twins Vivienne and Knox.
"You get together and you’re two individuals and you feel inspired by each other," Jolie says of her relationship with Pitt. "(Y)ou challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy. After all these years, we have history — and when you have history with some****, you’re friends in such a very real, deep way that there’s such a comfort, and an ease, and a deep love that comes from having been through quite a lot together."
Lately Pitt and Jolie — who announced their engagement in April 2024 — are dealing with how to introduce their kids to show business. Vivienne co-stars with Jolie in the May 30 release "Maleficent," with Zahara and Pax also making a brief appearance.
The movie is a live-action re-telling of the "Sleeping Beauty" story from the wicked sorceress Maleficent’s point of view, and Jolie explained that Vivienne was cast as the young Aurora because she was the only child who could withstand Jolie’s evil character.
"My little Vivienne — we call her my shadow, because there’s nothing I can do to shake her," Jolie tells Elle. "I can be tired, I can be grumpy, I can be in a terrible mood, and she doesn’t care. It’s ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ and she’ll cling to me. We knew that she would still do that thing, she’d still smile at me and insist that I pick her up. So we couldn’t really cast any**** else."
(And apparently Jolie did try; when she asked her daughter Shiloh "about being Aurora, and she laughed in my face," Jolie recalls. "She said she’d be a horned creature.")
While Jolie and Pitt don’t discourage their kids from being involved in their careers, neither of them is eager to see the brood follow in their footsteps.
"Brad and I made the decision that we wouldn’t keep them from sets and the fun of making movies, but we wouldn’t [glorify it either] — we wouldn’t make it a good thing or a bad thing," Jolie says. "But I would really prefer they do something else … (A)fter two days of it, Brad and I were so stressed we never wanted to do it again."