Action Woman

She may not be the most famous actress on Planet Earth, but she’s surely the scariest, and that’s including Sandra Bullock. As a little girl, Angelina Jolie dearly wanted to be a mortician or a funeral director when she grew up. She never quite got there, but she’s certainly retained that early sense of morbidity. She marched up the aisle with her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller, wearing a white shirt with his name painted across it in her own blood. She has an extensive knife collection which she dusts down for use during sexual encounters. (“You’re young, you’re in bed, you have knives – shit happens” she once explained to a gobsmacked journalist). And then of course, there was the very publicly played-out relationship with husband number two, Billy Bob Thornton.

She tattooed his name across her body, declared undying love and wore a vial of his blood around her neck. They exchanged graveplots on their first anniversary (isn’t that supposed to require a paper gift?) and banged on endlessly about their his’n’hers play dungeons. Less a whirlwind romance than one of the trailer-park tornado variety, it began suddenly, with Laura Dern believing that she was about to become Mrs. Thornton number five (ahhh!), only to hear on the entertainment news that her intended had eloped with Jolie. Sadly, it burned out just as quickly. They divorced last July after three years, and while Jolie doesn’t regret the relationship, it doesn’t appear to have ended on particularly good terms.

“I wanted to do all the things that a wife does for a husband because I wanted him to feel good,” she says of their time together, “and at the time I meant it, and I thought he was amazing, but now I feel like I don’t know him at all. We’re not friends now.”
Still, if the red-tops are to be believed, she isn’t short of suitors. When the sleazier tabloid hacks aren’t chronicling the epic, choreographed catfights between Jordan and Jodie, they seem to be slithering through Angelina Jolie’s dustbins trying to answer the great questions of our age – Is she back with Jonny Lee Miller? Is she seeing Nicholas Cage? For her part, Jolie insists that she hasn’t had sex in over a year but Kylie Minogue, for one, doesn’t seem inclined to believe her. Rumours linking Kylie’s current beau Olivier Martinez with the 29 year-old, Californian-born actress, had Kylie reduced to desperate ‘remember-me?’ cavorting on a beach accompanied by one or twenty million invited photographers.
However, ill-will from jealous girlfriends and antipodean dwarves is far from the worst of Jolie’s current woes. Her father, actor Jon Voight, appeared on American television last year in tears, begging his wayward daughter to seek psychiatric help for what he called “her serious mental problems”.
Jolie was enraged by his remarks, particularly as they could have proved problematic at a time when she was being investigated by the US Immigration Service. Having travelled through Africa and Thailand in her capacity as a goodwill ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, Jolie had decided to adopt, and despite her dad’s outburst and her unconventional lifestyle, she was found to be suitable, and is now mother to a two year-old, Cambodian orphan Maddox.
“I’ve always wanted to adopt,” she explains, “I don’t know whether I was a little kid and I heard what an orphan was, but I’ve always felt that I’d find my family across the world. I feel that if I had a biological child that there would then be a kid out there that I would have adopted, and now isn’t adopted, and is living in an orphanage.”
Jolie claims that her new role as a mother has brought clarity and sanity to her previously tumultuous existence.
“I now feel a total sense of purpose,” she reflects, “where before I only ever felt kind of useful as an actor.”
Not that the Oscar-winning actress is about to give up the day job. Currently you can catch her saving the world in Tomb Raider 2; The Cradle Of Life. It’s her second outing as arse-kicking cyber-chick Lara Croft, and Jolie was determined that the sequel would be a significant improvement on the disappointing original, as she explained when we caught up with her recently. And given that she looks about ten feet tall in person, we’re not that surprised that she got her way on the issue.

TB: You’ve said before that you hate Lara Croft. Why come back to the role for a second time?
AJ: That’s true. I did hate her. I hated the whole image, and that she’s extremely voluptuous and wears little skirts and not much else. And the first version of the script was as bad as that. It was really cheesy and more like Barbarella – she wasn’t the adventurer or strong woman she is now. So I started talking to the people making the film, and I said that the hot-pants had to go.

TB: She certainly seems a bit smarter in this instalment. Did you insist that her IQ went up and the trouser length went down?
AJ: Oh yeah. I wanted her to have depth and I wanted her to be challenged. I wanted her to make decisions and to show the audience what she’s made of. You see, we realised that the audience didn’t want Lara to be all mysterious. They wanted to know more about her. So, in this movie we see a lot more about friendships and love. Also, she’s not perfect. She bleeds, and she loses. That was part of the reason for wanting to do it, I think we felt there was a lot we had established in the first one and we had fun making it and we got some things right, but there was a lot I was not satisfied with and felt we didn’t quite get. I think there’s more humour to this one. Frankly, she was a lot more fun to play as well.

TB: You’re known to be an adrenaline junkie, who adores the action side of movies, so all the stunts must have been fun for you too?
AJ: Aaaagghhh, gosh. Yeah. I loved the variety of it, I loved propelling upside down and landing in the back of a jeep, there were so many things. For that one where I was hanging off the cliff – that was wild because that was the first time I had to do something crazy like that with another person, ’cos normally I’m alone in all the adventures. I like heights a lot, I’m very comfortable with heights, which is fortunate: I was probably much more comfortable hanging upside down over
100 feet than I was on a jet-ski in a bikini. I think it was just a bit too long, after we’d been up there quite a few hours you start to get dizzy.

TB: Was the bikini on a jet-ski the hardest scene to shoot then?
AJ: No. The horse was the most difficult part, if he doesn’t want to listen to you and decides to knock you off into the bushes. But it’s a pretty great job, if what you get to do in your life is travel the world and meet these amazing people and learn these new skills and go on this adventure, and so even when it’s kinda crazy or hard work I don’t take it for granted and I just enjoy the adventure of it. There were things in the film that I wanted to do and couldn’t, but that was beyond all our control, for insurance purposes. I come from a generation of women who were overly concerned with being too skinny or being unhealthy. I think to be athletic and strong and physically fit is great if at all possible.

TB: What was more difficult then, stuntwork or speaking Mandarin?
AJ: Mandarin. Definitely! It was quite hard, I spent a week rocking Mad (her son) to sleep just speaking it over and over to him. The odd things that he’s fallen asleep to!
Will your son get to watch your Mandarin speaking turn in TR2, or will that be in about ten years’ time?
Ermm, I don’t know, but I think that Maddox will love it. When he sees his mom on television, he points and yells ‘mom! mom!’ So he’ll find it funny, he’ll just think that mom’s a bit nuts. I’m sure it’ll be hard when I’m trying to tell him not to ride a motorcycle or get a tattoo. He’ll probably rebel against me so I’ll have to be a really passive intellectual or something.

TB: Did you feel added pressure because this was a sequel to a film that didn’t perhaps perform as well at the box-office as many had hoped?
AJ: Yes, it’s always a certain kind of pressure. Fortunately because of being a parent and other things I’ve been doing, I don’t take films so seriously any more – I enjoy making films now more than I did before, when I was maybe trying to be established in the business. And now I feel I’ll be happy for as long as I can continue to work. It’s odd, though, I wish there was more people on the poster with me. I went out the other day and there was this cab that went by with my face on it, me in a silver wetsuit. It’s just weird. But I’m proud of the film, so that makes it easier.

TB: How are you coping juggling motherhood and movie-stardom?
AJ: It’s hard, but it’s so wonderful; and it gives my life so much purpose, especially Maddox and my work with the UN, and so it’s such a pleasure to have a day full of so much responsibility for something that you believe is so important. I’m finally enjoying life – this last year, life has gotten very full and very complicated, and finally I’m very happy for the first time.

TB: Did it make things difficult that you and Billy Bob split up just after you had adopted Maddox?
AJ: No. I think I knew we were drifting apart even before we brought Maddox home. He started focusing on different things – his music and different films. I started focusing on travelling, and Cambodia and we just became very different people. By the time Maddox came, we were kind of living apart. And I’m starting to think that marriage is not my strong point. I haven’t really indulged in life as a single woman in any way ’cos I’m really quite busy with my life and with my son. But I’m sure at one point I will enjoy it. Whatever that means!

TB: Are you returning immediately to your work for the UN, or are you taking a baby-break?
AJ: No. I’m leaving for Russia the day right after the premiere, and then I’m going to the Congo. I’m still being told what security is allowing me to do, so I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing!

TB: Is it true that you’re moving to England permanently?
AJ: Yes. I already have a home in Buckinghamshire, actually. I live in England but I do have a place in Cambodia also. It’s not a big house, it’s right near a wildlife sanctuary that I’ve started, and we have this small area next to it that’s basically three little wooden houses on stilts and an outhouse, and that’s our house. We’re trying to deal with snakebite right now and figuring out when it’s safe, and it’s just been de-mined and they found 48 unexploded mines on the property in a Khmer Rouge bunker.

TB: That has to be the least desirable place on earth to let your son run about?
AJ: Well yeah, it is a bit like that, but because my son’s from that country and there are little children running all around that country with their parents, I feel like if their children are expected to live there then I shouldn’t be an exception. It’s his home, it’s his country.

TB: Do you feel any trepidation about dividing your time between Cambodia and Buckinghamshire – that it might impact on your visibility in Hollywood?
AJ: I don’t think so, I haven’t come across that yet. But I don’t know, maybe if I make more European films that might happen. I am looking at an apartment in New York, just to have a base there, but my main home is in England now.

TB: Why do you think that England has more to offer you and your young son than any other part of the world?
AJ: I’m going to get in some kinda trouble in America for this. To be honest, I grew up learning about American history, and I’ve become very aware of the world and all different parts of it and I’ve become a student of other cultures and other histories and I want my son to know that and so I feel living in Europe he’ll have a better education for that. I think the news is different here, the papers are different here. And without trying, you’ll get information – like last night, there was an hour special on Channel Four about the Congo. I don’t feel that that would have happened if I was in the States. Right now, that’s what is important – learning about other cultures and fighting for them.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider; The Cradle Of Life is on general release