Notorious Celebrity Interviews: Angelina Jolie
As one of Hollywood's most notorious actresses, Angelina Jolie has given some of its most notorious interviews. Because her career spans several decades, she has experienced many different styles of interviews. In particular, her image as a sex symbol has led to some very weird interviews from male reporters.
Let's take a look at three iconic interviews of hers that are also examples of classic celebrity profile styles.
Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame
Esquire, 2000
By John H. Richardson
- Her sentences are like sheets of mist that start to evaporate the second they hit the open air.
- Looking over the transcript now, after I've come to know her, it's very clear to me that it was all my fault, that I was suffering from a failure of imagination and trying to understand her as if she were normal when the only way to understand her is to crawl inside her language as if it were a complex modern poem and link up the elusive meanings and let go of the things you don't understand.
- I don't mean this in a patronizing way, because there are flashes of real poetry and insight and finally an almost absolute consistency in everything she says.
- She tried to explain that she didn't want to be in lingerie or anything of a clichéd sexpot nature and we did get the clothes and makeup and hair people and even the photographer she wanted, but even though they came out with slacks and jeans and leather pants, they threw in some lacy camisoles, "which to me is verging on lingerie," and because it is a men's magazine they probably were hoping to get a little bra showing or see-through and it was just generally a disappointment and she's always tried to be a good little celebrity but she's getting really tired of it and doesn't know if she can do it anymore.
- Maybe if it had been communicated more clearly we could have handled it better. And anyway, sex is a good thing and having seen a fair number of her previous photo spreads, they're not exactly lust-free zones. "Like the Rolling Stone cover--you were so glammed up."
"I wasn't all glammed up. The cover, I was totally red-faced from crying."
"Really?"
"Because I felt like a whore."
That picture in the black lace camisole? With her eyes all postcoital and her fingertips stuck suggestively into the famous hornet-stung lips? She was crying? - Talking about it, she gets upset all over again. "And I told him that. I told the photographer. And it's not Rolling Stone's fault, and it's not, you know, the wardrobe woman's fault or anything. It's--the photographer just had his idea of me being--and I talked to him before and I said, you know, if they wanted to get me free or wild, that--but, you know, they kept saying which--the same as yesterday. I kept saying to them, you know, that I just wanted to--whatever they--just to show me what they want."
At this point, I realize that the teapot is probably boiling... But I don't say anything about it because I want to see if she'll remember and I'm trying to concentrate on figuring out the point she's trying to make. - "They would kind of say, 'Well, we want you to be happy, we want to relate to you.' And you have to say, It's not me. I don't wear--it's a nice suit with shoulder pads and black leather pants, but I'm on a couch, looking like I'm just lounging or I've got smudgy eye makeup so it's more like I look slightly fucked up, and it's kind of the idea of, what are you getting across to people? Are you getting across to people that this is my idea of how a woman is sexual?"
- “You know, you’re sleeping with your kid all the time and you’re like, God, I haven’t had sex in months, let alone tempted anyone,” says Angelina Jolie… She’s slender in jeans and a silky tunic with a pattern of naked women on it, which she says she bought at a London sex shop, Coco de Mer. “It makes your ass look nice,” she says.
- “It takes a long time to create a situation like I have… And I had to become very clear, like, ‘This stays where it stays. One, you don’t have to talk about my son, because that’s not who you are. And that’s O.K., I appreciate it, but please don’t assume that that’s O.K.’
- “Three years later I called him and asked if he wanted to be lovers, and it was one of these phone calls of just, you know, a single mom sleeping with a baby and just, I’ll call a man up and ask if he wants to be my lover… And we spent a few dinners kind of discussing the details of how this was going to happen. It was actually fascinating.”
- “Someone who can make love to a woman.”
- “I hate Caillou! He whines.”
- This is a 9/11 story.Granted, it's also a celebrity profile - well, a profile of Angelina Jolie - and so calling it a 9/11 story may sound like a stretch. But that's the point. It's a 9/11 story because it's a celebrity profile…
- Instead of the things many predicted for America in the terrifying yet hopeful days after the attack - a moral resurgence, say, or the death of irony - we got a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and we got Angelina Jolie.
- One could make the argument that she is the most famous woman in the world. Why not, then, just go ahead and make the argument that she is the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage? The two arguments would seem hopelessly disconnected - the first being an objective assessment, or at least amenable to fact; the second being subjective and sentimental - but in truth they have become inextricable. In post-9/11 America, Angelina Jolie is the best woman in the world because she is the most famous woman in the world - because she is not like you or me.
- Certainly she doesn't look like you or me. Hell, she doesn't look like anyone except herself, which is one of the reasons she's the most famous woman in the world.
Wow. Fucking genius.
How he describes her skin:- Her flesh - her golden, mortified flesh - is extraordinary: Like the sheets on a barracks bed, there's no slack to it. And it shines. The beauty mark splashed over the finial of bone adorning her bare shoulder: It shines. She shines all over. Her eyes and her lips are, as advertised, extravagant creations, but then, in addition to all that extravagance, they also glisten like wet roads in a car commercial.
Again, the few times we read her own words gives actual insight into her:- When she visited Sierra Leone, “[I] just realized how completely naive I was to think I had a difficult life. I had no idea what a difficult life was. It was as if someone slapped me across the face and said, 'Oh, my God, you silly young woman from California, do you have any idea how difficult the world really is for so many people?' I got out of myself pretty quickly, being in the middle of a civil war.”
On a few rare occasions when he stops navel-gazing, the writer may actually have a few important insights about Jolie. For example, how she was working to build pathway through Cambodia that would allow elephants to migrate between the north and the south… partially because she wanted to sit in her home there with Brad Pitt and watch them for herself. But this only gets a brief mention, and then we’re back to his rambling.
But then the writer gets back to superimposing his own thesis on her again.- She did not become the most famous woman in the world because of the meaning she found in it. She became the most famous woman in the world because the world - well, American culture, anyway - found a way to tell a different story from the one she was experiencing, and this story is no less representative of the post-9/11 years.
- Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans? Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie's twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?
- And Angelina herself comes to be regarded as either better or worse, when it's pretty damned clear that she's neither, when it's pretty damned clear that the word that best describes her is a word the religion of celebrity has made difficult to say, and more difficult to swallow:
Good.
This goes on for thousands of words, by the way.
You can tell the article is incredibly deep from the cheesecake shots of Angelina with a silver satin sheet between her legs.
Poll
source, source, source
This type of magazine interview is one of the most infuriating, as it is a stream-of-conscious rambling full of run-on sentences about the male interviewer’s perspective of Angelina.
She is 50 minutes late for the interview. He immediately notes that she is incredibly thin, jittery, erratic, and skittish. He even checks her arms for track marks. He mentions multiple times how thin she is.
The writer is so damn self-absorbed that it takes 2,245 words to get to a direct quote from Angelina. Instead, he describes what she says to him according to his understanding of it. This is how he describes her style of speaking:
But he includes no examples of what she says. Later, he writes his own purple prose about what he thinks of her quotes.
She opens up to him about a traumatic experience when she was objectified she at her Esquire and Rolling Stone photoshoots. But, again, he puts his words in her mouth for us:
Oh- and he implies that it was her fault for not communicating better.
The Rolling Stone photo where she was trying not to cry:
He can't figure out why she is upset or the point she is trying to make:
Funny, when we get to read her own words, she makes perfect sense:
Next is a profile from Vanity Fair by Nancy Jo Sales, the infamous reporter behind Pretty Wild's "Nancy Jo? This is Alexis Neiers calling."
Sex and the Single Mom
Vanity Fair, June 2005
By Nancy Jo Sales
It was 2005, and Angelina was promoting Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt.
The guarded, PR-controlling Angelina is nowhere in sight. This Angelina talks frankly about setting up booty calls with two different lovers as a single mom:
She confirms that Billy Bob cheated on her, that he was terrified of weird things like antiques, that he was not ready for kids, and that he was generally a bizarre-ass dude.
The Angelina of this interview is witty, cynical, a little flirty, and clever. Why does she come across this way? Probably because Nancy Jo Sales lets her speak for herself.
For example. Her first criteria for a man?
She also hates the cartoon Caillou:
Finally, the longest, weirdest, and least revealing of all the profiles. This one is commonly referred to as The Worst Celebrity Profile Of All Time because... well, read it for yourself.
Angelina Jolie Dies For Our Sins
Esquire, July 2007
By Tom Junod
This time, the (male) writer takes 1,343 words to get to Angelina herself. And the first paragraph?
The whole point of the essay is to somehow make the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000+ people about Angelina Jolie.
Here is just one example of his dick-thinking ramblings disguised as intellectualism: