You could never accuse Angelina Jolie of being enigmatic. Regardless of how much her ultra-goth image has been carefully orchestrated for the public, she has certainly provided a seemingly endless stream of salacious details for the consumption of said public, and very few of today’s Hollywood players could claim to have half as hair-raising an offscreen persona. She freely and openly discusses not only her extensive collection of knives and blades, but her penchant for actually using them during sexual intercourse. As Jolie once memorably quipped: ‘You’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives, shit happens.’

At the age of 21, she married Jonny Lee Miller in black rubber hotpants and a shirt with his name inscribed in her own blood. In keeping with the blood motif, since she subsequently became Mrs. Billy Bob Thornton No.5, the happy couple wear vials of each other’s blood at all times. (They got married in May of last year, much to the surprise of everyone, including Thornton’s then live-in girlfriend Laura Dern).

Prior to getting hitched for the second time, there were the rumours that Jolie was sleeping with her own brother James: rumours which were not exactly quashed when she snogged him, full on the mouth, upon winning 2000’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Girl, Interrupted. Clearly, then, even as kids brought up in the madhouse known as Hollywood go, Angelina Jolie is a more volatile individual than – to take an example with a similar background – Gwyneth Paltrow.

Now 26, the progeny of veteran actor Jon Voight and French thesp Marceline Betrand would seem to be on a sharp career curve in the upward direction. While a great deal of her roles to date have been in unspectacular affairs such as Hackers, Pushing Tin, Playing By Heart and Gone in 60 Seconds, she has certainly proved her considerable acting range, most notably with that stunning Girl Interrupted performance and a Golden Globe-winning role as a bisexual junkie supermodel in Gia.

Although her current role as Lara Croft in the eagerly-awaited movie adaptation of PlayStation phenomenon Tomb Raider is unlikely to provide similar critical plaudits, it undoubtedly offers Jolie her most prominent role to date. Though the videogame-turned-movie has hardly proved a profitable or even reputable genre in the past, Tomb Raider’s producers at Paramount have invested heavily (to the tune of $100million) in the hope that this film will spawn multiple sequels and a massive merchandising franchise. As such, Jolie had to fend off much competition for the lucrative lead role (including genuine Brits such as Liz Hurley).

Unsurprisingly, then, she is positively gushing when it comes to discussion of the pneumatic cyber-chick beloved of adolescent boys everywhere.

“Lara Croft is a great role model. She is very, very much a girl. She’s extremely tough, but she’s also a bit naughty, which I love. She’s really good at what she does. It’s not that she’s as good as a guy: it’s that even if she was competing with a guy she might win. Not because she’s a girl, but because she’s a better fighter. She’s full of fun and fire. She doesn’t apologise for herself ever. She isn’t angry. She’s playful. She is certainly enjoying everything about this. And I think that’s different for a hero. So I think a lot of girls like Lara Croft as well as boys. It’s hard to live up to – I mean, Billy has two beautiful children, and they sit up playing the game all night long and they think it’s so cool I’m doing the part.”

Given that Jolie’s devotion to Billy Bob’s brood has even prompted her to swear to refrain from killing him in the event of future infidelities (she said recently, “I wouldn’t kill him because I love his children and they need a dad. But I’d beat him up, and I know where all his sports injuries are. And I’d beat her too...”), it’s fitting that she went to great lengths in order to do Lara justice (including a rigid multi-disciplined training regime).

“We had military weapons training which wasn’t just shooting. It was taking weapons apart, putting them back together again and so on. I canoed up and down the Thames river. I learned how to kick-box. I got every possible injury. I pulled ligaments. I burned myself on a chandelier. But the most difficult thing to do was learning to bungee ballet. It took me a while to learn how to work the harnesses. So many nights I’ve gone home limping, soaked in a bath, dealt with different injuries and tried to get through the next day.”

The training regime may have looked after the muscle tone, but there was the additional problem of Lara Croft’s more unattainable anatomical proportions.

“I don’t exactly have the body. I mean I did work out hard and we had the tight outfits and they gave me a good padded bra, but we couldn’t go to the extremes of the complete game. If you look at the game, she’s got huge breasts. But you know, of all the actresses in Hollywood I come pretty close, I never wore skin-tight clothes in a movie so people don’t know my body. I do have breasts, but I’m actually built more like a boy.”

With Jolie’s father Jon Voight coming aboard the project to play Lord Croft, Tomb Raider also afforded the opportunity for some overdue family bonding, with Voight’s role as an absentee father echoing his own absence from Jolie’s formative years.

“Lara’s father died when she was eight. She never met her mother who died in childbirth. And so she was raised by a father who educated her very well and she travelled the world. He was an explorer, and though she was very young when he died, he left many different journals and set up a whole world for her to grow up in. I never remember a time in my life when I needed my father and he wasn’t there, but he’s an artist, and it was a certain time in his life when he left us. It was the ’70s, a strange time for everybody. He’s always been very intense, but we really got to hang out on this movie. We just talked about amazing things: great people in history, great artists, great work, great music. We can talk for hours. Or we can call each other up and be in character and we’ll tell each other what scene we did that day, and we’ll act it out for each other.”

Despite daddy’s presence and the challenge of bulking up, both Tomb Raider and Jolie’s last big screen outing (the Bruckheimer-produced Gone In 60 Seconds) would seem strangely conservative choices for an actor just after winning an Oscar. Particularly in light of her comment that she sees her choice of roles as ‘therapy’. She happily defends her career choices to date, however, on the grounds of an unwillingness to be stereotyped in any way.

“The thing about this business, they like to stick you in one thing and they tell you ‘oh you’re a dark person’ or ‘you’re a sexy person’ and you can’t be something else. You just have to keep fighting against it. I usually try to look for something I haven’t done before, a side of me that I haven’t completely explored.

“But there are different sides of me that are harder to explore, Like with Lara, I thought I was the last person in the world to even like this woman – Jonny used to play the game all the time and I used to have to compete with the perfect woman. I used to make jokes about her, but then I discovered that she and I are not that different. She’s very positive and I’m used to living in my own head and being dark. But the more I discovered about her, the more I realised that she’s a bit insane. She’s not just this smiley jock girl. She’s a bit punk, a bit wild – and you know, my kind of sexuality is that I’m very free and I’m very curious and brave and that’s what I eventually found sexy about her. She’s free. She’s sexy. She’s alive. She’s like a wild animal.”

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider opens on July 6th