SHOCK TREATMENT - An
I turn around to tell
ANGELINA, THE ACTRESS
For some of you, your
Acting is the family
"I've gone to things
In light of all that,
Whether she's in minor
THE WILD WOMAN
Which brings us to
But when I turn around
Angelina is already
This has been a really
THE EXTREMIST
Angelina's perception of
(I'm glad she brought
"They're right to think
Back to Angelina's free-
If Angelina is going to the trouble of wondering
"I'm like the bad gut,
In a strange parallel
THE WOMAN WE CAN'T FIGURE OUT
Forty-five minutes and
Angelina has a jones for
"It should be a
"I don't need to be with
The auto museum is a
"Here," she says,
Once again, I don't know what to say.
THE ANSWERS
Okay, you've seen the
"Oh, God… It's -
"Also, a close friend of
"And it's not this film-
It's strange to think
"But this person made
I feel guilty for saying
"You just accept that
afternoon with Angelina Jolie: cars, knives, sex
with woman, adopting kids. Nice of her to tone
things down for Suzan Colon.
"I am so sorry I'm late."
I've only been
occupying the slightly filmy table at Johnie's-a
L.A. diner so low-rent they don't even include the
second n in the name-for about 10 minutes. This is
where I'm to meet Jolie, the 24-year-old actress
whose considerable talent is frequently
overshadowed by both her beauty and her
eccentricities. But that just makes her more
alluring, right?
her not to worry about being late, and for a long
couple of seconds, nothing comes out of my mouth;
now I know what they mean by stunned silence. I
was not prepared for this woman.
first experience with Jolie might have been the
movie Lookin' To Get Out, which she did when she
was 7. More likely it was The Bone Collector,
Angelina's first starring role in a big movie. But
most people first saw Angelina in HBO's Gia, based
on the messed up life of supermodel Gia Carangi.
business. Angelina's father is Jon Voight. Her
favorite movie of his is Anaconda, but people
generally prefer him in the classic Midnight
Cowboy. Angelina's mom, Marcheline Bertrand, is
also an actor, but less well known than Jon.
where my father's with me and my mother and
brother get pushed out of the way," Angelina
says. "My father has made a choice to speak about
me every time he dose an interview. I've made a
choice to not have it be about that. I got in a
big fight with this interviewer. I said, 'I don't
want to talk about him.' He said, 'Because you
don't like talking about him?' And I said, 'Okay,
I'll talk about him, but answer this-how's you
relationship with you father? Do you feel like he
loved you?' It's strange, isn't it, for somebody
to just come up to you and ask that. But if I
didn't mention my mom, nobody would care."
it's important to point out that it was Angelina's
mother who encouraged her to act. We would've
loved to have gotten her take on her career, but
Marcheline doesn't do interviews. Angelina used
her middle name to avoid accusations of getting by
on her father's legacy. (Actually, their parents
gave Angelina and her brother interesting middle
names- Jolie and Haven- for just that purpose.)
Angelina studied acting at some pretty prestigious
places, including New York University, where she
enrolled after her movie career was in full swing,
not the other way around.
movies like Foxfire, or outright disasters like
Playing God, Angelina is invariably the one bright
spot mentioned. Occasionally competing with her on-
screen successes are the things she dose off
screen. She's won two Golden Globes, on for Gia
and another for George Wallace. At one of the
ceremonies, she celebrated by drinking tequila and
jumping into the hotel pool in her fabulous dress.
Can you blame her?
These are things you're most likely to read about
Angelina: She collects knives and has alluded to
using them in-or as-foreplay (I have no idea).
When she married her Hackers costar Jonny Lee
Miller, her wedding outfit included a white T-
shirt with his name written in blood. She has said
she's done every drug imaginable. She is not shy
about nude scenes or kissing woman. She's got quit
a few tattoos, including one going across her
stomach that reads Quod me nutrit me destruit-
Latin for "what nourishes also me destroys me."
today, to Johnie's restaurant, where hissing
noises are coming not from the grill but from the
cooks, where truck drivers are ramming down
cheeseburgers for lunch, and everything kind of
stops when Angelina walks in.
Of course, you're expecting me to say that,
because she's so gorgeous, which is what I was
expecting, too.
to tell her not to worry about being late, I'm
speechless. Angelina's hair is white blond and her
face is competing with it in terms of paleness.
Makeup tries to cover her troubled skin (alas, it
works about as well for her as it dose for me).
She's taller than most actresses, around 5 feet 7
inches, which only accentuates her narrowness;
she's seeming in black leather pants and her black
T-shirt hangs on her. Her eyes seem sleepy, but
her gaze is direct. She's beautiful, but in a
rough, dangerous way. She looks like a tall, blond
razor blade.
talking before she sits down, about Gone in 60
Seconds, where she plays a car thief along side
Nicholas Cage, Robet Duvall and Giovanni Ribisi.
She pauses just long enough to give a huge order
to our waitress: steak, mashed potatoes with
gravy, corn on the side and a salad. She's not a
fast talker, but a steady one, kind of a rambler.
So when her salad comes, I tell her to feel free
to eat, she doesn't have to talk the whole
time. "Oh, this is, like, so not food to me," she
says. Granted, a wilted salad doesn't make the
best breakfast. "oh, nooo," she says, "this isn't
the first thing today. I've been eating. I'm
trying to put some weight on. That's why this [the
offending salad] feels like a waste of time.
tough time in my life," she says, "so, getting
nervous, I don't eat much, even though I remind
myself. And just, like, five pounds will look so
different," she continues. "I'm hoping to get on a
program soon. When I was in the hospital with a
friend who had an IV in her arm, I was like, maybe
if you stick that in me, just actually inject pure
protein, you know. I would love to have my figure
back. I always felt like I didn't have one."
That's strange, considering the amount of Web
Sites devoted to Angelina's nude film appearances
alone. But I guess people's views of themselves
are often different from the reality.
herself is that she's trying to be expressive.
Other people think she's a little destructive. "I
wanted to go to a premiere with the Hell's
Angels," she says, now stabbing at her gnarly
looking steak, "But the press said, 'Oh, you can't
do that.' People have said to me, 'You're too
outspoken. Why are you talking about being gay?'
and I'm like, 'I'm not gay, I played a gay
character, Gia. It's great when you discover that
you love other woman.'"
this up. In our entertainment poll, many of the
people who nominated her for Female Actor Who
Makes Your Knees Weak-and by that I mean girl
people-wrote things like "If I was ever to switch
teams, I'd want to play her every position." And
the reason I'm glad she brought this up is because
I didn't know how to say, "You know, you really
bring out the latent lesbian in out readers!"
that about me, because I'm the person most likely
to sleep with my female fans," Angelina smiles,
her eyes narrowing coyly. "I genuinely love other
woman. And I think they know that.")
wheeling expression: "I'm trying to shake things
up," she says, "I don't want to do something I've
done before. I want to wear wings and colored
contacts and tattoos in movies so I look
different. I want to have an accent, cause I think
it's important."
what color her character's eyes should be, imagine
the research she's doing on their personalities.
She gets so into it, that when she talks about her
characters, she bounces back and forth
between "she" and "I." This makes for great
acting, but not for great living-especially if the
person you're playing is a pot of trouble, like
Gia, or Lisa.
but I really do feel that she's right," she says
of her character. "Lisa's just looking for people
to be fucking straight with her. She didn't hold
anything back. If she wanted to spit on somebody,
she spit on somebody. She had no inhibitions and
no feelings."
with Lisa, Angelina confides, "I've gotten in a
lot of fights with people because I need to get a
reaction."
four bites of steak later, we head across the
street to the Petersen Automotive Museum. A group
of young girls recognize her and ask for
autographs. For a person in her early 20's,
Angelina has none of the girlishness associated
with that age. She seems a bit serious, like she's
seen a lot and not liked much of it. And yet she
shows no attitude, as she signs her autograph-and
it takes a while, because she wants to write
something personal and different for each one of
the girls: Call me the next time you want to skip
science class-Angelina Jolie.
kids, as in wanting one. She seems to be leaning
toward adoption rather than giving birth because
there are so many kids out there. There may also
be a grain of doubt about the dependability of
relationships. Her marriage to Johnny lasted three
years. She's most recently been with Timothy
Hutton, her costar from Playing God, and the end ;
of that relationship found her wondering what the
definition of love it. But, surprisingly, not in a
negative way.
combination of thinking, 'I love you but I just
want to rip that apart and eat you,'" she says. "I
just haven't found that person to break through
with. But I've just gotten signs. Certainly my ;
husband and I were… it was great, kind of an
honest experiment. Maybe some people don't find
another person, you know?"
a person, but I do want to start a family. I mean,
selfishly, it would make my life so much fuller,
worth living. I'll have to have inspections," she
says of the adoption possibility. "People have
said to me, 'You do the cover of Rolling Stone in
a certain outfit [it was lingerie] and you talk
about knives and being gay, the judge is going to
see that. "I'm the dark horse, so it's like ;
suddenly… But…" She slows down and frowns. The
idea that there may be a price for being free, for
being herself, seems to be tainting Angelina's
thoughts for the first time.
large, dark place filled with classic cars,
ancient gas pumps and a very big gift shop. It's
in here that Angelina really comes alive. She's so
excited by the racing flags, the tiny model cars,
the car books. She's still in her latest
character's mind, still thinking "car thief."
Poring over the merchandise, she buys two key
chains, two pairs of fuzzy dice, two black and
white racing flags.
thrusting one of the shopping bags at me. "We'll
have the same stuff. Now we're partners."
pictures, you've read the story, and now you're
probably jumping to all sorts of conclusions about
what could possibly going on with Angelina.
Because that's what was going on at the Jane
offices. Addiction? Anorexia? Insomnia? It's just
like a bunch of journalists to discuss every dire
situation possible before coming up with a simple
solution: Ask her.
everything has become overwhelming," she begins,
over the phone two weeks later. "I did two heavy
films-Bone Collector and Girl, Interrupted-back to
back, and I was emotionally wiped out. I though I
was going to take some time off, but I got the 60
second script, and it looked fun. During filming,
my divorce became final, so that was another thing.
mine got very sick. I had stress from these
things, obviously, and I didn't look well, my face
broke out, I showed up on the set, and they
said 'You go home.' Somehow it made a bunch of
people very upset with me because they didn't know
whatever was going on. I didn't feel like
explaining somebody's private business, but you
suddenly thing, 'God, here I am looking really
skinny, and I can't eat…' I can now, I'm fine, I
just went through an emotional time. But when you
do that in this business, you realize the ugliness
of what the worst in their eyes would be, that
[people are] thinking that you're sick. If in the
future I ever was, this is how little people would help me.
these people ended up being great to me. But it
just made me yearn for a normal life.
that, even though Angelina will talk about almost
anything, there are still rumors to be
circulated. "This person asked me about cutting
myself when they saw a scar," she says. "I'm very
open, but because of that, people think that they
know everything about me, and actually they don't
know anything. I say things that other people
might go through. That's what artists should do-
throw things out there and not be perfect and not
have answers for anything and see if people understand.
the cutting sound interesting, like it was
something I do now. [For the record, she did, but
doesn't now, and doesn't endorse it.] And then I
met somebody who said they'd seem movies of mine
and then showed me where they had cut themselves.
I had to explain, first off, not to do that. But it
makes me really fucking angry at the people who
represent me in a way that would get that person
to do that and how me. I don't understand why
people would want to use something so damaging.
It's like, let's make me look 'cool' and worry a
lot of people in my family."
that Angelina looked to pale and thin, just as I
would feel stupid if I'd said she looked perfect.
Ultimately, though, she doesn't really care what
ends up in this article.
you're going to hear rumors about yourself," she
sings. "But I know that truth, and my people who
love me know the truth. That's all that really matters.
