Angelina Jolie for ELLE US June 2014
On her 20s: “[The media] misinterpreted as [me] wanting to be rebellious. And in fact it wasn’t a need to be destructive or rebellious—it’s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you. You want to be free. And as you start to feel that you are being corralled into a certain life, you kind of push against it. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you’re trying to find out who you are I realized that very young—that a life where you don’t live to your full potential, or you don’t experiment, or you’re afraid, or you hesitate, or there are things you know you should do but you just don’t get around to them, is a life that I’d be miserable living, and the only way to feel that I’m on the right path is just to be true to myself, whatever that may be, and that tends to come with stepping out of something that’s maybe safe or traditional.”
On her relationship with Brad Pitt: “You get together and you’re two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy. After all these years, we have history—and when you have history with somebody, you’re friends in such a very real, deep way that there’s such a comfort, and an ease, and a deep love that comes from having been through quite a lot together.”
On her kids being in the new movie Maleficent: “And my little Vivienne—we call her my shadow, because there’s nothing I can do to shake her. I can be tired, I can be grumpy, I can be in a terrible mood, and she doesn’t care. It’s ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ and she’ll cling to me. We knew that she would still do that thing, she’d still smile at me and insist that I pick her up. So we couldn’t really cast anybody else. I asked Shiloh about being Aurora, and she laughed in my face. She said she’d be a horned creature. Brad and I made the decision that we wouldn’t keep them from sets and the fun of making movies, but we wouldn’t [glorify it either]—we wouldn’t make it a good thing or a bad thing. But I would really prefer they do something else… after two days of it, Brad and I were so stressed we never wanted to do it again.”
Photographed by Hedi Slimane