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:: total film magazine: february 2000 :: She strides into her suite at LA's Four Seasons Hotel, bundled away in a long dark trench coat and jeans. Her hair is tightly - no, make that painfully - pulled back in a bun and her face free of make-up, drawing attention to her bee-stung lips. The effect is of a woman who has a) dressed from the laundry basket after a hard night on the town; b) failed to pay her gas bill and just been cut off; or c) doesn't give a damn because she knows that she has Hollywood at her feet. Guess which Angelina Jolie is... Jolie's position in Hollywood has been cemented with a Golden Globe for Girl, Interrupted, co-starring with Winona Ryder as mad bad Lisa. It comes after two other Golden Globes (for TV movies Gia and George Wallace) and her recent role as cop Amelia Donaghy, which made her one of the few good things to come out of The Bone Collector. She's currently fresh from the set of her current project, Gone In 60 Seconds, a '70s B-movie remake which sees her swiping cars with Nic Cage and Vinnie Jones. "I've been very fortunate to find roles that I fit in at this time," Jolie says, settling down. "If I hadn't found The Bone Collector, if I hadn't found Girl, Interrupted, I don't think I would have worked at all... I can't even think about it. "After The Bone Collector and then this, I was pretty much dead, pretty much at my wits end and a bit shell-shocked. And so I was going to take time off. But then I read this thing called 60 Seconds and I had to smile. She was just a clean, blue-collar girl under a car with a bunch of guys. Thank God. For me it was like this little part in this light film. And then suddenly it's like 'this is a Jerry Bruckheimer Film'. It's certainly bigger than any of my work." Undeniably sexy in any movie that she's appeared in, today the 24-year-old actress presents an odd combination of candour and reticence. Throughout her conversation, sentences and thoughts not only collide and meander, but also take the 37 bus downtown and return again (picking up a few additional passengers along the way), never quite arriving at their final stop. Suppose you were to ask Jolie about - oh I don't know - sex? "I've not had sex in so long," she laughs. "There was this thing the other day on TV. Some weird psychic was matching people up according to their signs or something: 'And this person will match with this person and they're both very sexual.' And I'm watching going: 'Yeah, that's me.' And there I was sitting there covered in food in my room..." Independent enough to ditch her family name Voight (the daughter of Midnight Cowboy star Jon, Jolie is her middle name), her freewheeling conversational blurriness, several tattoos and unHollywood attitude to life ("You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens" was her response to rumours that she cut partners during sex) may explain her somewhat slow rise in the movie industry. The films she made between 1995's Hackers (best remembered for her shortlived marriage to Brit co-star Jonny Lee Miller) and her second Golden Globe award for Gia in 1998 are eminently forgettable. Or they would be if anyone had bothered seeing films like Love Is All There Is, Foxfire and Mojave Moon in the first place. Then in 1997 things began to click. A small but showy role as a gangster's moll in the David Duchovny vehicle Playing God was a start, but it wasn't till LA ensemble flick Playing By Heart and a sultry appearance as air traffic controller Billy Bob Thornton's wife in Pushing Tin (she says he's sexier than co-stars Denzel Washington, Cage and Ryder) that the world really started sitting up and taking notice. 
Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold was reportedly wowed when she first read for the part of Lisa, the charismatic sociopath who dominates the mental hospital that Winona Ryder's character is sent to. But Jolie refuses to take credit, preferring to pass it on to the book the film is adapted from. "I read the book years ago," she recalls. "When I read the script, it was that speech at the end that grabbed me, about 'having buttons and pushing them and not feeling anything'. At that point in my life it was like a crying scream that I needed to have... I was very happy when I got it. I was screaming." Jolie also discovered that the woman her character is based on had died a few years ago. "Winona told me. She asked if I wanted to know what happened to her," she recalls. "I bet she went out f*cking feeling everything as she always did, with that intensity." Jolie's got no plans to jack in the acting game just yet (she's due to be in Michael Cristofer's period thriller Dancing In The Dark [renamed Original Sin] later this year), but that doesn't stop her keeping her eyes open. "I was looking at the classifieds today and I was thinking about truck driving. I honestly was! Just for the hell of it! They were teaching it and would actually pay you to learn. So I don't know why I stick with acting," she laughs. "For now I just ... I guess it's because it's everything to me. I mean, I probably wouldn't stick with it if I was doing the same character for years. But I was a cop this year. And then they locked me up with these amazing girls. And then I was like f*cking racing with people down the streets of LA in these hot-rods. And now I'm going to get in a corset and go to Cuba and find my husband. Thank God I haven't lost my mind yet." Push her about co-starring with dad and she's into the idea - kinda. "Yeah, I mean I think it'll be an amazing day when we get to a point in our lives when we both have the same story to tell. I don't know if it'll ever happen. I really want him to do something like Clue and to play some crazy, some character with a moustache or something. I desperately want him to do that. I want to do that with him..." (c) 2000 Futurenet Publications, Inc. |
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