Jolie: I’m just trying to get through the days
Angelina Jolie talks to about family, divorce and her contentious new film
Angelina Jolie, 42, has spoken of how being single has taken a heavy emotional toll on her since she split up with Brad Pitt last September. In an exclusive interview with The Sunday
Telegraph, she said: “Sometimes maybe it appears I am pulling it all together, but really I am just trying to get through my days. Emotionally it’s been a very difficult year.” Jolie, who has six children – three of them adopted – married Pitt in 2014, but filed for divorce two years later. She said: “I don’t enjoy being single. It’s not something I wanted. There’s nothing nice about it. It’s just hard.”
If she didn’t have a film to promote it is highly unlikely Angelina Jolie would be sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite talking – albeit reluctantly – about her life since separating and filing for divorce from Brad Pitt last September. But she is a showbusiness veteran and the film she co-wrote, produced and directed, the Cambodian-set drama First They Killed My Father, needs publicity. So she is submitting to a long weekend of interviews while admitting: “This is the first time I have done this for a long time. It’s not easy. I am a little shy this time, because I am not as strong inside as I have been in the past.”
The last 12 months have clearly taken their toll on the 42-year-old actress, who is looking pale and gaunt.
“It’s been difficult,” she says. “I don’t enjoy being single. It’s not something I wanted. There’s nothing nice about it. It’s just hard. Sometimes maybe it appears I am pulling it all together, but really I am just trying to get through my days. Emotionally it’s been a very difficult year and I have had some other health issues. So my health is something I have to monitor.”
Four years ago she caused a stir by announcing she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy after learning she had an 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer. Her mother had breast cancer and died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at the age of 56, while her grandmother also died of ovarian cancer, aged 45. In 2015 Jolie had her ovaries removed and last year, in addition to hypertension, she developed Bell’s palsy, causing one side of her face to droop. Acupuncture helped her recover.
“So much in life you just focus on how much worse it could be,” she says. “And I am so happy I don’t have cancer, and that if I do get it, it will be delayed for a few years. The exchange for that peace of mind is quite good.
“I feel sometimes that my body has taken a hit, but I try to laugh as much as possible. We tend to get so stressed that our children feel our stress when they need to feel our joy. Even if you are going through chemo, you need to find the ability to love and laugh.” She pauses and smiles, then adds: “It may sound like a postcard, but it’s true.”
Her children – Maddox, 16, Pax, 13, Zahara, 12, Shiloh, 11, and nine-yearold twins Knox and Vivienne – feature prominently in the conversation. Angelina is negotiating custody arrangements while she settles her divorce. All six were with her in Cambodia for the four months she spent filming First They Killed My Father, which is based on Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir of the Khmer Rouge genocide, in which Ung’s parents and two of her siblings died.
Jolie has been a Cambodian citizen for a decade and owns a house near the Thai border, so the time they spent there was of special significance to her and Maddox, whom she adopted there when he was three months old.
“Mad has known of Loung’s story his whole life, and I told him, ‘One day, son, you will be ready and you will tell me it’s time to go deeply into your country. But I need your help and you have to work and you have to be there every day and you can’t say no and that you are tired’. And one day he said, ‘I am ready’.
“I really wanted Maddox to learn about Cambodian history, so I felt that this movie was a journey that we could take. And he went deeply into the research and into the edit. And having somebody younger there to say, ‘You are losing my attention’ or, ‘That is too complicated’ was really helpful.”
The film is a family affair: Maddox is credited as an executive producer, Pax did some photography stills and the other four were on set every day and became playmates of the child actors.
“70 per cent of Cambodians are under 30,” says Jolie. “And if they watch this film and they don’t want what happened to be repeated, then they will be the ones to take the country forward.”
She talks swiftly and quietly with mainly good humour. The only time she becomes testy is when I ask her about the controversy that surrounded her casting methods for the movie. In a Vanity Fair interview, she implied that her casting directors had played a game in which they presented money to the impoverished youngsters and then took it away from them, awarding the lead role to a little girl who became “overwhelmed” by having to give it back.
Jolie’s lawyers asked for a correction but the magazine stood by its story.
“I have explained it and you can look it up,” she says sharply. “It was a mischaracterisation and it didn’t happen in any way that wasn’t absolutely with the thought of what was best for the child and the family.”
First They Killed My Father is the fourth film Jolie has directed but, right now, she has no immediate plans for either acting or directing. Instead, she and the children recently moved into a $24.5million house once owned by Cecil B DeMille and settling in is her priority. “I am going to cooking classes,” she says. “Cooking is one of those things you do when you are settled in your life and you can take the time. But somehow I am just very impatient and I am a little bit erratic.
“But I am getting into it now. I feel like, if I cook, the kids can all hang out. Although they often take over and tell me that they can do it better.
“The children have been amazing. It’s been so moving to see how much they have helped each other and how much they have helped me. They have really come into their own and they are finding themselves and their voices. I know that they will have each They Killed My Father. First other for life and it gives me great peace to know the day I pass away that they will take care of each other.”
Since finishing the film, she been a guest lecturer at the London School of Economics, talking to students about her experiences as a UN special envoy.
“Part of the reason I wanted to teach was that I wanted to learn, too,” she says. “I really wanted to hear from the generation coming up what questions they have and what their goals are.”
If and when she returns to filmmaking, the chances are it will be as a director rather than an actor.
“When you are an actor you’re not able to sculpt the final story,” she says. “But to be able to oversee everything, even the music that goes into the edit, feels very different.”
Jolie met Pitt in 2004 on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith and has devoted the past 15 years of her life to motherhood. But her life has changed dramatically during the past year and now she is thinking about changing with it.
“I think now I need to rediscover a little bit of the old me,” she says. “I think we lose our way a bit. I have had a lot happen in my life, from certain people passing to health issues to raising the children.
“And it’s been a very good time to absorb and develop and grow. But maybe now that my kids are growing up I am starting to realise that my own sense of play has been put on hold for a while. And maybe them hitting their teens is going to bring out a little more fun in Mom.
“So maybe I am going back. It may be time.” First They Killed My Father,
John Hiscock
‘Sometimes maybe it appears I am pulling it all together, but really I am just trying to get through my days. Emotionally it’s been a very difficult year’