Angelina Jolie seems pretty fearless, but even the Oscar-winning actress and director, 40, has her moments. Originally, she wasn’t planning to cast herself in the marital drama opposite her real-life husband, Brad Pitt. But when that moment came, she found herself second-guessing some of the planned scenes.
“There were lots of scenes I wanted to change or cut,” she admitted to the New York Times in a new interview. “I realized it was going to be me [naked] in that bathtub. But I told myself, put all of that aside. Like, you can’t change or cut this scene because you’ve had a mastectomy, or because we’re married and people are going to analyze this or that. That would be cheating.”
In February 2013, Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy to reduce her chances of being diagnosed with breast cancer, which runs in her family.
Jolie and Pitt, 51, filmed the movie in Malta, shortly after their August 2014 wedding, which took place at Château Miraval in Correns, France. She has often referred to filming as their “honeymoon.”
“A few days into filming I thought: This is such a bad idea. What was I thinking?” she told the NYT. “This is going to destroy us before we’ve even gotten started. But by the time we got to the end of the film, we’d argued, challenged each other, disappointed each other, had good days, bad days, all of it. We’d pushed through, learned something about each other, found a new working relationship and came to like the idea of ‘Yeah, it gets really bad, but you work it out.’”
As for the actual act of marriage, Jolie claimed it didn’t alter their 10-year relationship much.
“It was just a nice thing,” she said of her nuptials. “For me, the big moment was when [we] signed the [joint adoption] papers for Maddox and Zahara. That was a decision to parent together, to commit to being a part of each other’s lives for the rest of my life. So [marriage] wasn’t close in comparison. In a way, it was very casual.”
Years after that adoption was legalized, 14-year-old Maddox served as a gofer on the By the Sea set. And though he was closed off from some particularly graphic scenes, Jolie did recall one awkward moment the two shared on set.
“I remember one day I was in my robe, my mascara was running down my face, my hair was still in curlers, and we ran into each other in the hallway,” said Jolie, whose father, of course, is Oscar winner and Hollywood vet Jon Voight. “He just shook his head, like, ‘Wow, Mom. Nice.’ This business, I grew up in it myself, so I’d almost be happier if the kids weren’t interested. But he loved it.”
