Angelina Jolie Interview 2 / 2

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Angelina Jolie Interview Part 2

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Two weeks ago, while Jolie was in Africa, Randy Scruggs visited their basement studio. Though the album Thornton had been working on was notionally finished, Scruggs had the rudiments of a new song. "I don't know if you want to do a song about your wife," he said, and sung a chorus. They wrote the rest of the song, "Angelina," in a few minutes. Thornton plays it in the studio. "It's basically the story of how we met," he says.

As the music starts playing, Jolie wraps her leg up around him. After the first two lines she pulls him close and they begin kissing.

I walked into an elevator

And you walked into a wall

You said you wanted to be with me

But I never dreamed I'd have it all

Thornton kisses her foot. "I have a foot thing," she says.

"We have a whole foot thing," he says.

They had heard about each other for a long time. Geyer Kosinski -- her manager and formerly his agent -- had told Thornton that they should meet, because they were similar. But they hadn't. Two years before they met they were in the same room and Jolie avoided him. Then they both signed up for the movie Pushing Tin. On the day she arrived in Toronto, they got into the same elevator. I invite them to reminisce.

"I said, `I'm Billy Bob -- how are you doing?' and then we came out of the elevator, and I just remember ... you know wanting something to not go away? Wishing the elevator had gone to China. It's like a bolt of lightning. Something different happened that never happened before."

"Something went wrong with me in the elevator," she says. "Chemical. I really walked into a wall. It was the elevator. I kind of knocked it as we were both getting out. He got into a van and he asked me, `I'm trying on some pants -- you want to come?' And I nearly passed out. All I heard was him and taking off his pants. I just said no. And I went around the corner and sat against a wall, breathing, thinking, `What . . . was .. that ... ? What the fuck was that? Jesus, how am I going to work?' I was just confused. I became a complete idiot." She smiles. "I still have my moments."

One night, they went to dinner. They were both accompanied -- Thornton by his assistant, Jolie by a business visitor from Hollywood -- but they talked. "We were not able to be together at that time," says Jolie, who was still unpicking her first marriage; Thornton was with actress Laura Dern.

"We never at that time said one day we're going to be together -- we couldn't," says Thornton. "But I know now that it was impossible not to be together."

"We would say strange things," she says. "We would just randomly be talking about something in our lives, like the difficulty of living with people, and he'd say, 'I could live with you.' I thought ... not that I wasn't good enough for him, but that I didn't know how centered in any way or together or solid or good for anybody I was. So I wouldn't have assumed that that would be a great thing if we were together."

They weren't in contact for a few months after Pushing Tin, but then they began talking on the phone.

Jolie and Thornton have just gotten over a kitchen crisis. A few days ago they bought a load of food to inaugurate the George Foreman grill they'd ordered from the TV. They cooked the steaks, but forgot about the fish and chicken, and only today were whiffily reminded that unattended food goes bad.

I listen as they bicker about whether either of them really can cook eggs. They like to hang out in the kitchen. This is where they eat, picking at food or eating food they've ordered in, standing at the counter. There's a dining room next door, but they've never used it. (A myth exploded: The story has spread in recent years that Thornton eats nothing but orange food. This is not true. Though they have a bowl overflowing with papayas, one of his favorites, and though he is quite clearly a picky and particular eater, I see him eat some cold meat from the fridge, some raisins and some asparagus with salad.) She eats a lot of Cheerios. "Greatest food in the world," she says.

The week before my visit, Angelina Jolie was in Africa. She spent time in refugee camps in Sierra Leone and Tanzania. She got in touch with the U.N.'s refugee program, because it was something she wanted to learn about. "I don't want to talk about it a lot," she says, wary of how she may sound. "Selfishly, I knew it would change my life to really understand." She visited amputee camps, war-wounded camps, camps for women who've been through trauma. "It's not like I did things that made much of a difference," she says. But something had changed. "I'd gone outside my own little world."

"I collect vampire books, she says, gesturing toward the appropriate clusters on her office bookshelves. The vampire fascination came early -- "when other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire" -- and her interest in blood endures. She bought her husband and herself clear pendants inside which you are supposed to place dried flowers. Inside theirs, they have each other's dried blood. "It's us being corny romantic," she explains, sincerely. She'd like to go further. "If there was a safe way to drink his blood, I'd love to," she says. "We've thought about it. You lay in bed and you just want to bite holes into each other. It's not about cutting yourself or some kind of weird thing -- now it's just, 'I want to eat him.'

"People look at your life and they think, `Well, yeah, you were married all these different times,' " says Thornton. (Aside from his relationship with Dern, he has been married four times.) "I've had a lot of shit go on, so it's easy for people to say, `Oh, right, it's just another thing! It's not another thing. This is different in every category. It says it in the song."

"We love each other obsessively, madly," says Jolie. "All those things I worried about before, going crazy, it's all focused on each other and we're going to explode."

"Tomb Raider" was mostly filmed in London, where Jolie was required to work out and stop smoking and drinking. (She drew the line at giving up coffee.) Though flying is high on the things Thornton dislikes to do, he went to London to visit. (He had fun, went to lots of record stores. He didn't eat much, however. All those old buildings. "I can't really eat around old stuff," he explains. Thornton will often joke about his OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. One evening, playing me a song from a CD, he will apologize and say that, as the song he wants to play is the second track, we'll have to hear the first track. He can't put on a second track, cold. He just can't.)

Jolie says the movie was good for her. "If Lara Croft's got a problem, she gets up and fixes it," she says. "If she's frustrated she breaks something. That's what life can be. I read something once: `What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.'"

There are a couple of pathways that don't go through the fire, you know.

"Yeah. Not for me."

In Thorton's office, there is a myna bird named Alice. Jolie had an accident with the bird -- she mistakenly fed it gravel rather than bird food -- and she's worried that it hates her. Thornton says that Alice can almost say "Fuck you," except she can't get her beak around the f. On one of my house visits, when Thornton goes out, he leaves on a CD of Captain Beefheart poetry for Alice.

"So we're going to go and buy a rat cage, are we?" asks Thornton of his wife. They have decided that Harry's cage is too small. "We could go to Petco," he suggests, "because they'll have a selection."

Jolie eats an apple. He puts his hand between her legs. They hug. We get in his car. Thornton drives; Jolie sits behind him. A CD of John Lennon hits is playing. They're getting sad. In two days, they will be apart. She is going to Seattle to film a romantic comedy with Ed Burns, Life or Something Like It. He goes to Louisiana to film Monster's Bal in which Heath Ledger plays his son.

Jolie leans forward and kisses him. "Oh, one day," she says. "One day I'm going to eat his earlobe."

We go into Petco, and they compare the different small-- rodent cages. She points at one, the Small Animal Starter Kit, excited.

"Honey, it's got a hammock!" she exclaims.

She wanders on, and looks at the dog diapers, the dog breath mints, the cat toothpaste and the bird buddies.

"I feel like there's nothing here for rats,"Jolie says indignantly. "Rats are normal... aren't they?"

They buy the cage. "He's going to be so happy," she says. Back home, Jolie and I sit on the kitchen floor and assemble Harry's new cage. "We've made one small vermin very happy," she declares. Jolie is proud that things seem to be working out with Harry. "I have a bad history with pets," she says. When she was fourteen she had an iguana called Vlad, but when she started getting acting jobs she had to leave him with the vet. Then, a few years later, she and Jonny Lee Miller had a white albino snake called Harry Dean Stanton. They were both leaving for jobs, and they couldn't find anyone prepared to kill the mice to feed the snake. For a while she thought the only humane thing was to end Harry Dean's life. She tried but she couldn't do it, so she called the vet who had found Vlad a home and asked if he could give Harry Dean an injection. "He said, `If you promise me you'll never get another pet, I will take Harry and find him a home.'"

And you did promise?

"Yeah, but I assume he was kidding. I just tried to think what was for the best, and realized most of the time that being with me was not the best thing for a pet." She smiles. "This rat seems to be taking it fine."

The jukebox is filled with Thornton's music, and CDs are everywhere -- he's been introducing her to all this stuff she doesn't know. She grew up loving the Clash. "They get you kind of riled up and aggressive in a good way," she says

On the far side of the room is Elvis Presley. "That would be a fiberglass Elvis with loafers on," she accurately points out.

I ask an innocent enough question: Do you spend evenings in here playing pool?

A mischievous smile. "We usually spend evenings not playing pool."

Meaning?

She says that she doesn't want their friends to be put off from playing pool when they visit.

So what you're saying to me is that you and your husband have been having sex on the pool table? "Yes," she agrees, "we have. I've got this weird rug burn."

For a brief period in 2000 -- just after the lazy dismissive line on Jolie changed from being "She's the crazy one (or -- the accusation that really hurts - the one pretending to be crazy) who's into knives and tattoos," but just before it became "She's the crazy one doing weird things with her crazy hillbilly husband" -- what people said about Jolie was that she was having (or, as before, pretending to have) an incestuous relationship with her brother Jamie. The evidence given was a) the long kiss she gave him, her Oscar date, when she won the Supporting Actress prize for Girl, Interrupted) her statement from the stage: "I'm so in love with my brother right now."

"It was a difficult time for my family," Jolie says. "I haven't talked to Jamie for a few months. I think he and I'm not sure -- but somehow he made a decision to ... to . . ." -- she pauses and begins to cry -- ". . . to not be around me so much, so we wouldn't have to answer stupid questions."

Jolie says that she sent her brother her Africa diaries to save on a computer: He's the only one she trusts. "We even talked about it: Do people actually really think that we're sleeping together? No -- it can't possibly be. The Oscars, it was completely shocking to me that it was taken that way. I was hugging him, I kissed him.... If it seemed too long ... He loves movies, my brother. He knows who won every Oscar. I was up for an Oscar. And he was so supportive. So when I said, `I'm so in love with my brother now,' what I was trying to say was, more than getting a fucking award I can't believe how much this person loves me. And somehow that was turned into god only knows what. Basically they were completely missing the real story, which is how great it is that two siblings support each other -- if you're in a divorced family sometimes kids get a lot closer and hold onto each other."

At the Oscars, of course, there was someone else she was also thinking of, but she couldn't yet say. Coming off the stage she tried to find Thornton and left him a message. Then she left the parties and drove to the Sunset Marquis; she met Billy in the garden and sat with him on the ground outside. "He was in his pajamas and he'd just put the kids to sleep," she says. Soon after that her brother helped her pack so she could go off and get married.

The spare bedroom is locked. This is because it also houses the Los Angeles half of the Angelina Jolie knife collection, about twenty or thirty knives of many shapes and sizes. (The rest are still in New York.)

"I think they're beautiful," she says. "I have knives from all different countries around the world. Different rituals. I like honor, and codes of honor. And so I have knives."

That's how it started, but when she was a teenager knives also took another role in her life. "When you can't feel anything from life," she begins, "you walk around and you don't feel the weather, you don't feel other people; even if I had somebody near me physically before it just didn't feel like anything, it didn't feel like enough, nothing ever really got inside me. So I went through a phase, yeah, where I'd cut myself because then that absolutely felt like something."

That's not that uncommon.

"No, a lot of people have that. People do other things -- let themselves get hurt, beaten up. A lot of people drug themselves. A lot of people have sex like that. I didn't do that. I really have had very few people in my life."

Jolie talks more about the bad old days. "There were moments where I just wanted physically to have something... whether it be a knife or a whip, you want to be drained of everything that is making you ... you want somehow to have everything go quiet. Other people do sexual things or try to make themselves perfect -- that's another kind of sickness. Some people go shopping. I cut myself."

Jolie makes a big point of saying how furious it makes her when people imply that she still does any of this -- it was years ago -- or that she thinks it's cool. "Yes, I understand what it's like when you want to see blood to feel you're alive," she says. "But I am not going to do that again. I have found other ways to feel ... It's just different with Billy. Everything is very loving and very tender and I can be a girl ... but it's also extremely explosive sex." She laughs.

Right.

"Which makes me ... His mind and his body is everything that I've ever wanted, more than enough to satisfy me, I'm thrilled with life. But for me it's only him that that made sense with. It really didn't make sense before."

In the spare-bedroom display cabinets, she points out the knife her character brandished in Foxfire, and the big new one from Cambodia, and her throwing knives, which in certain moods she likes to throw across rooms into cardboard boxes. "It makes me feel better," she says. But she also says that she hasn't got them out for a long time.

Continue: When she was nineteen, and her career was beginning to take off