ANGELINA
JOLIE does not travel light.
A few weeks ago, when she arrived for the New
York Film Festival premiere of “Changeling,” the new Clint
Eastwood drama in which she stars, she brought along her partner of three
years, Brad
Pitt, and their sons, Maddox, 7, and Pax, 4, daughters Zahara, 3, and
Shiloh, 2, and 3-month-old twins Knox and Vivienne. The eight of them had flown
in from Germany, where the family has settled while Mr. Pitt shoots Quentin
Tarantino’s World War II adventure “Inglorious
Bastards.”
“We’re all a little jet-lagged,” she said, not looking jet-lagged in the
least as she settled in for a brief stay at the Waldorf-Astoria before moving
the clan on to New Orleans. Carrying a lot of baggage is something Ms. Jolie
seems to greet with serenity — as a mother. As an actress, however, she knows it
poses a potential problem.
At 33 she occupies a rare place within Hollywood’s uppermost tier of female
stars. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she cannot escape her several
identities. The serious actress who won an Oscar for 1999’s “Girl,
Interrupted” and much acclaim for playing Mariane
Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel
Pearl, in last year’s “Mighty Heart” is also the dominatrix-ish action
dynamo who can open slam-bang guy movies, like this summer’s “Wanted.” There’s also the humanitarian activist who has served as a United
Nations good-will ambassador and is now a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations. And there’s her role as half of Brangelina, an
unincorporated business that remains the celebrity magazine industry’s best bet
for surviving the economic crisis.
Ms. Jolie, who is disarmingly easygoing and more delicately beautiful and
finely featured than red-carpet photographs suggest, said she mostly manages to
ignore her alternate plane of existence as a tabloid sensation. She lives “in a
bit of a bubble when it comes to people’s perceptions of me, which I’m sure is a
very good thing,” she said, laughing, “because I’m sure it’s not always very
nice.”
If Ms. Jolie finds the attention irritating, she’s too smart to complain
about it. But she admits that the wealth of available information about her
could create a self-defeating conundrum. Her ever-growing fame could endanger
her ability to do the very job that made her famous in the first place — to make
audiences believe she’s somebody else. In short, to vanish.
“Can I do that?” she asked. “I certainly hope so. I wouldn’t put myself
forward to do a film like ‘Changeling’ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into
a story because of all the other ways people see me.”
In “Changeling” Ms. Jolie plays Christine Collins, a switchboard supervisor
and single mother in 1928 Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son is kidnapped. (The
story has its roots in a series of gruesome killings known as the Wineville
Chicken Coop Murders.) Five months after the child’s disappearance, the Los
Angeles Police Department hands her a boy it insists is her son, and department
officials attempt to destroy her life when she says they’re wrong. The role, in
which Ms. Jolie must embody the agony of not knowing if her only child has been
murdered, puts her, in some ways, back in the wrenching territory of her last
drama, “A Mighty
Heart.”
When Ms. Jolie first read the “Changeling” script, “I said, this is
absolutely great, and I never want to do it,” she recalled. “I don’t want to put
my consciousness on children being kidnapped. But I couldn’t forget about her. I
found myself telling Brad and friends of mine the story.”
“Changeling” arrived at an especially painful moment for Ms. Jolie. In
January 2007 her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer at 56. “My
mom, she was a very, very soft woman,” she said. “It was hard for her to yell,
or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength
she didn’t always know she had. And there’s a part of Christine that I connected
to her. I kept pictures of my mom in the little purses” that her character
carries in the movie.
Grief hit Ms. Jolie hard — and led, oddly, not to “Changeling” but to
“Wanted,” a blood-splashed, R-rated comic-book adaptation in which she gives
what she wryly called “my Clint Eastwood performance” as a ruthless, almost
superhuman gunslinger who utters barely two dozen lines.
“I knew instinctively that I needed something before ‘Changeling,’ ” she
said. “I was depleted. I was in a state of just wanting to pull the covers over
my head and cry about my mom. It was just too much. For me, there have been
times when an action movie, even a ‘Tomb Raider,’ has helped me get out of
myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.”
Ms. Jolie, who says she doesn’t particularly like to watch her own work,
hasn’t seen “Wanted.” The film has grossed more than $300 million worldwide.
“I’m glad it worked out,” she said with a smile.
She has, however, seen “Changeling.”
“Clint asked me to,” she said. “What are you going to do, say no to Clint?”
Except for a brief hello years ago backstage at CNN’s “Larry
King Live,” Ms. Jolie said she had never met Mr. Eastwood until she arrived
on the “Changeling” set. But she knew of his reputation for running a tight ship
and for finishing even complicated scenes in just a couple of takes.
“I can sometimes roll without even saying a word,” Mr. Eastwood said of his
filming process. “I’ll just motion to the cameraman, and he turns it on, and
there we go. But she understood what things are like, and she was ready.”
Ms. Jolie described it in other terms. “It made me terribly nervous,” she
said. “The first day it moved so quickly. There are big, emotional, heavy things
in that movie where it was, maximum, two takes. So I woke up in the morning not
feeling relaxed. I would make sure I understood where my character was coming
from, I was prepared emotionally, my lines were crisp. I was more ready than I’d
ever been on a film because that’s what he demands.” By the end, Ms Jolie — who
learned she was pregnant just before she was to shoot her harrowing scenes set
in a mental institution — said she felt “this is how I should always work: I
should always be this professional and prepared.”
Since winning her Oscar almost 10 years ago Ms. Jolie has carved out a
distinctive identity; unlike most other actresses of her age she is
interchangeable with no one. Growing up, she said, she found her on-screen role
models weren’t actresses but rather “Al
Pacino in ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ Brando in ‘Streetcar,’ Nicholson — I just
always liked the men.” That may be part of the reason she has become virtually
the only current A-list actress to achieve her status while completely bypassing
romantic comedies. Nobody is ever likely to call her “America’s Sweetheart.”
A dark period, when Ms. Jolie was cast as the man eater who broke up Mr.
Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer
Aniston during the production of the 2005 caper “Mr. and
Mrs. Smith,” is behind her. And although in her 20s she was prone to
provocative statements about blood, tattoos and bisexuality, in her early 30s
she has learned how to feed the beast while making it serve her purposes.
Recently she and Mr. Pitt auctioned off pictures of themselves with their
newborn twins to People and Hello! magazines, raising an astonishing $14 million
for their charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.
Today her career strategy seems more akin to, say, George
Clooney’s than to Cameron
Diaz’s. She has amassed an impressive record in action-driven hits like the
“Tomb
Raider” movies and “Gone
in 60 Seconds” while making regular (and generally less successful) forays
into more serious work, most recently in ensemble pieces like the 2006 drama “The
Good Shepherd” or lower-budgeted movies like “A Mighty Heart,” in which
several critics suggested that her fine performance was undermined by the fact
of her celebrity.
“Changeling,” a big-studio drama that she must carry on her shoulders while
submerging the tensile, sexually charged physicality with which she has often
defined herself, is another step outside of her comfort zone. And while Ms.
Jolie discussed the film with enthusiasm, it was evident that her mind isn’t
mainly on movies now. She has taken all of 2008 off from filmmaking and has only
one movie lined up — the spy thriller “Edwin
A. Salt,” which will begin production in February and which, in an
indication of her box office clout in action films, was reconceived for her
after Tom
Cruise dropped out.
In addition she will reprise her vocal performance as Tigress in the sequel
to this summer’s “Kung Fu
Panda” — the only one of her roughly three dozen movies that any of her
children have seen. “It’s a big hit in the house,” she said. “Jack
Black is like De Niro to the kids.”
After that, she said, she’ll stay home for another full year, and she expects
acting to play a diminishing role in her life as time goes by. For the past
several months, since the twins were born, the older kids have been
home-schooled, “and they’ve had Mommy and Daddy every day for every meal, and
they’ve been very close to us.” It’s not a routine she’s eager to disrupt.
Deciding to take a job is “really hard,” she said. “Who’s in school at that
time? How can I be sure I don’t do too many long hours? Can the three youngest
be on the set every day?”
“As long as I can still be with my family, it’s fun,” she added. “But I only
want to do that, and I’m not looking for anything else.”
About that family, she and Mr. Pitt aren’t planning to stop at six. “Oh, no,”
she said happily. “I mean, I know we seem crazy, just bringing them in one after
the other, but we do plan. We make sure one is absorbed completely into the
family before we add another. There are moments when we look at everyone around
the dinner table, and it’s just crazy, but our family is the greatest thing
we’ve done in our lives.”
It’s hardly surprising that the children are Ms. Jolie’s focus right now.
(“Just come tell me if you need me to pump,” she said to an assistant before
starting the interview.) She worries about the day that Maddox, who is now old
enough to use the Internet, will “look up my name and see some kind of sexy
pictures or read a story about himself that isn’t true. There’s a lot we’re
going to have to explain to them about how public their family is.”
Nonetheless, she said, she looks forward to the day when she can put “Mr. and
Mrs. Smith” in the DVD player for the children; “not a lot of people get to see
a movie where their parents fell in love.”
“What’s going to be funny is when they think Mom and Dad are a little bit
cool,” she added. “Because right now, we’re not cool Mom and Dad.”
“Even video games, you know, it’s: ‘Mom, you can’t play this. You won’t know
how.’ Oh, they all think I can’t do anything, that I’m just there to snuggle
with. But the other day Madd said, ‘Can you do a cartwheel?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,
I can.’ And he was like, ‘Wow, Mom.’ And I thought: ‘Oh, yeah. I can do some
things. You wait. You’ll find out. I’m
capable.’ ”