On Monday, British Vogue published an interview with Angelina Jolie that took place over two days in November, starting on Election Day. She often has something to promote when she agrees to a profile (when Vanity Fair profiled her in 2017, she was promoting her movie First They Killed My Father). This time around, in conversation with British Vogue editor in chief Edward Enninful, she spoke of her upcoming biopic of war photographer Don McCullin, though it doesn’t appear they’ve started filming yet, and the book she’s publishing for children and young adults this year (authored in partnership with Geraldine Van Bueren and Amnesty International), which attempts to teach children their human rights. So while she always has stuff going on, there’s no huge press push for a film that would warrant such a feature. Instead, she spoke a lot about life as a mother.
In this interview she sounded completely warm and open, as she usually does, using the children’s nicknames or shorthands (“Mad” for Maddox, “Z” for Zahara). She said things that felt very honest but also didn’t betray too much, like when asked if she was happy, she said, “I don’t know. The past few years have been pretty hard. I’ve been focusing on healing our family. It’s slowly coming back, like the ice melting and the blood returning to my body.”
And she obliquely mentioned Brad Pitt, explaining why she moved to Cecil B. DeMille’s former house in Los Feliz (which she had bought just in time to host V.F.’s Evgenia Peretz there): “I wanted it to be close to their dad, who is only five minutes away,” she said. The house has come up before in her profiles, which she seems to be doing every two years (or more). “I would love to live abroad and will do so as soon as my children are 18. Right now I’m having to base where their father chooses to live,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2019.
Jolie is famously the master of her own message, managing her own press. This could be a useful interview for her, especially amid the interminable divorce from Pitt, which in October reheated with a renewed custody battle. They were also set to return to family court in November to determine how they would all spend the upcoming holidays, with an anonymous source claiming that Pitt was pushing for “increased custodial time” all around as well (no word on the exact terms of the resolution, though it was rumored that Pitt would be spending Christmas with just three of his children). The overall custody trial was reportedly slated to end on October 23, and this interview happened less than two weeks later.
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