How do you unwind after a hard day diving out of helicopters, tip-toeing around the edge of high-rise buildings and firing guns for spy film Salt? If you’re Angelina Jolie, you race your boyfriend on a motorbike, of course…
‘They wanted me to play a Bond girl in Casino Royale,’ says Angelina Jolie. ‘I said, “Actually, I’d prefer to play him; I’d rather be Bond.” It was a joke – kind of. It was an interesting conversation.’
At the time, Jolie was already over 30. At that age, there aren’t many Hollywood actresses who would turn down the chance to raise their profile with a role as a Bond girl – but Jolie wasn’t interested in being the leading man’s sexy sidekick.
Instead, in upcoming thriller Salt, she plays the leading ‘man’ herself – ‘Jane Bond’, if you will – in a harsh, realistic role initially written for Tom Cruise. Jolie, 35, who earns a reputed £10 million a movie, is no stranger to action roles – her Tomb Raider films grossed more than £280 million.
But Salt is something unlike her previous roles – something serious. Jolie’s character is an entirely different sort of female lead – as merciless as Jason Bourne and the recent, reinvented James Bond; and someone who’s never going to recline purring in a hotel room with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket.
‘Salt is nothing like Bond,’ says Jolie. ‘In so many spy films women are femme fatales and we wanted to avoid that. My character doesn’t use her sexuality to get anything. It’s the roughest I’ve looked. When we fight, it gets ugly. Somebody breaks my nose in the film. It’s not pretty.’
olie herself had plenty of input into how the character should be adapted for a woman.
‘I think when people write things for women – at least with the films I’ve done in the past, such as Tomb Raider – they’re not serious. They’re not raw. They’re not hard. So when we wanted a real female action hero, we looked towards something that wasn’t written for a woman.’
Jolie is a self-confessed news junkie, and was fascinated by the real-life story of Russsian spy Anna Chapman, which echoes the plot of Salt – about a ‘Day X’, when deep-cover agents from the Eastern Bloc suddenly reactivate. The story broke long after Salt had finished shooting. Jolie had spent time with real female CIA agents and found that they were less glamorous than Chapman – but seemed far more dangerous.
‘The two women I met were sweet-looking, smallish framed, blue-eyed, blonde-haired and looked like they would be running the little store in the high street or teaching in Ohio,’ she says. ‘But once you started talking to them you could see how they steered through this demanding world and how dangerous it was. And they are tough women. They told me that as women they had real difficulty dealing with relationships. They said the hardest thing is to be in a job where you can’t talk with your husband about anything that’s happening.
‘You go on a trip and you can’t tell your partner where you’re going. You come back and you can’t tell them anything about what happened. They said that keeping track of the lies was very hard and made them feel distant from people outside the CIA. And as women, I think it was extra hard because they are nurturing by nature, and emotional, and it’s hard not to want to share and talk.
‘In the original script the character was Edwin Salt so our first joke was to call her Edwina but it didn’t suit me,’ she laughs. ‘So we settled on Evelyn. And I didn’t feel that a woman would have a child in that position and so they changed the script. If a woman had a child, I think it would be very hard for us not to imagine her holding on to that child through the entire film. Which is strange because I think audiences would allow a man to have a child who is with his wife back at home. But it would be very difficult to see a woman not be 100 per cent focused on her child.’
When she accepted the role, Jolie had just given birth to twins – a time when most new mothers think of little else but caring for their offspring. But she has two competing aspects to her intriguing personality: ‘There’s mum – and then there’s the side that likes to get down and dirty,’ she says.
When the Salt script was couriered round to the Jolie residence, she was ‘at home in my nightgown feeling very maternal with my new babies. I remember I was with them in my bedroom and I flipped through the script. It was all about getting out there and attacking and being very physical and I did feel really funny, thinking, “If I can do this it would be a nice balance: the being soft at home and then going to work and filming this hard, physical role.” It seemed like a real challenge. And I like a challenge.’
Jolie, along with stunt co-ordinator Simon Crane and her stunt double Eunice Huthart, helped to develop the spectacular action sequences seen in the film.
‘We talked a lot about the way Evelyn fights,’ she says. ‘Bourne has a wonderful way of fighting, Bond has a great way of fighting, and all of the other action-movie characters have their styles. So we thought, “What should be right for Salt?”
‘And the thing that was maybe the least obvious for a woman became the thing that we relied on, which is that she’s mean. Really mean. Not flashy, not gymnastic, not inventive, she’s just mean when it comes down to it. She kicks, she uses her elbows, she fights to survive and it’s not pretty. So that was a different thing as a woman. Fights I’ve had in the past have been more elegant. I have punched in real life back when I was a teenager and I know real fighting is awkward and not cool at all.’
Jolie is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. Both she and her partner, Brad Pitt, are qualified pilots; together they own a Cirrus light aircraft. Her latest passion is motorbikes. Recently, on her 35th birthday, Pitt gave her a flame-red MV Augusta.
‘I’m not sure what cc it is,’ she giggles. ‘But I can tell you it’s a proper bike and it’s powerful. I used to have a bike years ago, but I hadn’t owned one for a long time. Brad’s a really good teacher – he’s really patient. I’m very impatient so I can wreck a bike if I’m not careful. Sometimes we’ll go on the track together and there you can go really fast and let your hair down.’
Jolie comes to life when discussing her adrenaline-fuelled hobbies and she’s just as animated about her stunt work. Her escapades for Salt included jumping 30ft from a motorway bridge onto the roof of a truck and diving 60ft from a Black Hawk helicopter, bungee-style. She also edges out, in bare feet, on to the windowsill of a high-rise Manhattan building, 11 storeys up.
‘Luckily I’m not scared of heights. It was really high and, while I had a safety wire on, if I had fallen I would have dangled like a pendulum and whacked into the side of the building and it would have hurt. With the motorway sequence I did a lot of jumping on to the cars.
‘But there were a few things that I couldn’t do that my double Eunice did. One jump was from one moving truck to another. I would have liked to have tried it but it would have been insane to do so. She could have died doing it and the producers didn’t want me to have a go – for one thing I’d have needed a wire and it wouldn’t have looked as good.
‘Doing a few stunts is a great part of the job; it’s wonderful therapy,’ she laughs. ‘I wasn’t scared. I get a kick out of it. I love that kind of thing. But I am fearless to the point of stupidity sometimes. Maybe I should have a little more fear.’
Indeed, towards the end of filming Jolie’s luck ran out. The scene involved her character bursting in through a door, diving to the ground and rolling over, firing a handgun. It seemed straightforward enough.
‘I have punched in real life back when I was a teenager and I know real fighting is awkward and not cool at all’
‘It was first thing in the morning and I thought, “This is a piece of cake,'” she recalls. ‘So I jumped inside, rolled over and smashed into a ledge and it knocked me right between the eyes and cut me open. I didn’t get knocked out but I was swearing. I had this gash right between my eyebrows, just under an inch long. They helped me up and the nurse came and put some gauze on it. But I was pretty dizzy and everyone was getting paranoid about it. I was feeling nauseous too and I had trouble walking for a few seconds. I had all these weird signs of concussion. So they sent me for an MRI scan just to be extra cautious and that was all clear so they put some of those tiny stitches over it and bandaged me up and I was fine. I went back to work later that same day.
‘It’s funny because towards the end of the film my character has so much blood and cuts on her, it blended in. It was just one more thing on my face. And it’s left a tiny scar. You pick up scars on your body over the years and I don’t mind them. It’s character and it’s part of life.’
Years of intense training, handling weapons and honing fight techniques have turned Jolie into a formidable fighting machine.
‘I can handle myself,’ she says. ‘And learning self-defence is a good thing, for a man or a woman. It’s empowering.’
Even so, tackling the physical preparation needed for a role like Salt so soon after giving birth was a daunting challenge.
‘I started getting fit when the babies were still small; a few hours each day, gym work, working on the fight routines, and I got back into the rhythm. And then I’m filming and suddenly I’m running down the street with a gun, being chased and jumping off a bridge and thinking, “What am I doing? How did I get here? I’m not an action star, I’m somebody’s mum.'”
Jolie’s hair is back to its natural colour, auburn, and tumbles down around her shoulders. She’s make-up free and her skin is clear and pale. But she looks fit and well – and although slender she’s not as painfully thin as she was a couple of years back.
Her tattoos – 12 at the last count – map out the various stages of her life: there are co-ordinates representing the locations where her children were born; a tiger and a dragon on her back; ‘What nourishes me also destroys me’, in Latin, is written just below her navel; one dedicated to her brother, James Haven; and one for her boyfriend, Brad Pitt.
‘My teenage years were terrible. I had periods of great discovery but I was a very anxious, a very unsettled teenager’
‘That’s private,’ she smiles. Most are not visible but she has the letter ‘M’ on the palm of her right hand, representing her much-loved mother, who passed away three years ago.
I’ve met Jolie several times in recent years, in Cannes, New York, London and Los Angeles. She’s delightfully open in interviews. While other A-list stars bat away questions they consider too intrusive, Jolie is candid, direct and funny. She really does seem genuinely amused by much of the fuss that surrounds her. An arched, pencil-thin eyebrow will greet a cheeky query – ask about Pitt’s recently shaved off beard for example – usually followed by a giggle to register that she finds some of the more bizarre rumours about her too silly to give much credence too. But she is always unfailingly polite.
Today she’s in mum mode. It’s another beautiful day in California, and hers started early, getting breakfast for her six children at her sprawling ranch-style home in Santa Barbara (there are also homes in New Orleans, Cambodia and in the south of France, complete with its own vineyard).
There are her adopted children Maddox, who will be nine this Thursday, Pax, six, and Zahara, five, and she and her partner Brad Pitt have a biological daughter, Shiloh, four, and twins, Knox and Vivienne, two. Pitt, her partner of five years, is at work, filming the baseball drama Moneyball.
‘We take it in turns to do films,’ she says. ‘So Brad’s working now while I’m not. It’s a rule that we really try to keep.’
She stresses that all is happy in Brangelina world.
‘We’re great,’ she laughs. ‘And we can laugh about most of the things written about us because we’re OK.’
In fact, she reveals that they take great pains to keep their relationship fresh, planning ‘date nights’.
‘We actually schedule them. We just had one the other night and we went next door so we didn’t have to worry about the paparazzi and the kids didn’t know where we were. We have a house that has two sections so we go to the part that’s normally the studio and the office and just have dinner as a couple. If you can hold it together – which is hard these days and a lot of people separate – then you have to work at it, and you have to make that time when you are not Mum and Dad once in a while.’
The daughter of actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died from cancer in January 2007, and Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, she was raised by her mother after her parents separated when she was one year old. Her relationship with Voight has been fractious and there have been long periods when they haven’t been in contact. Are they back on good terms?
‘Well we’ve spoken and we do speak.’ She doesn’t elaborate and in a way that speaks volumes.
She started acting seriously as a teenager but it wasn’t a happy time.
‘My teenage years were terrible,’ she says. ‘I had periods of great discovery but I was a very anxious, a very unsettled teenager and that’s why with my kids I’m showing them as much of the world as I can. I think one of the things that frustrates youth the most is that you feel that you don’t know where you belong in this world – you don’t know how you can be useful, you feel like the walls are too small. I started acting but it was a lot of trying to escape that feeling of being caged, trying to discover something. It wasn’t a joyful thing.’
Throughout her twenties, that restless search for stability led her into two marriages – with British actor Jonny Lee Miller and later, Billy Bob Thornton – and both ended in divorce. During this time, she exuded a dangerous sexuality – even wearing a vial of Thornton’s blood around her neck during their relationship. But these days there’s a balance, she says, with acting and home, and with her high-profile work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations.
Pitt, she says, is a great father.
‘He’s strong, intelligent, he’s sensitive – and he’s a real man, in all the best ways that can mean.’
Jolie is the biggest female star in the world and can pick and choose from the hottest scripts in Hollywood. Her next pet project is Cleopatra, a role famously played by Elizabeth Taylor. That’s for the future; right now it’s all about Salt. One of the things she likes about the film is the way it keeps the audience in suspense until the very last frame. Is Evelyn Salt really a Russian spy? Or has she been framed? In many ways she is the perfect role for Jolie, who is just as likely to keep us guessing about the next twist in her own intriguing life.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
