In a Bombshell Vanity Fair Interview, Angelina Jolie Opens Up About Life After Brad

In a new interview with Vanity Fair Angelina Jolie opens up about her new film and life as a single mother of 6.
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, January 2007

It’s been almost a year since Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt shocked the world with the news that they were breaking up, revealing in the process that they, too, are mere mortals who found marriage to be pretty tough. Now that the initial ugliness of their divorce proceedings is behind them—the pair promised earlier this year to keep their issues private and try to amicably co-parent their six children—Jolie is opening up for the first time in the new issue of Vanity Fair about life after Brad, single motherhood, and putting on a brave face for her brood.

“I was very worried about my mother, growing up—a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me,” she tells the magazine. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, split from her father, the actor Jon Voight, when Jolie was young, after Voight reportedly cheated. “I think it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything’s going to be all right even when you’re not sure it is.”

Photo: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott / Courtesy of Vanity Fair

Jolie continues to be uncharacteristically candid in the sit-down with Vanity Fair’s Evgenia Peretz. Additional revelations include:

Jolie denies that her and Pitt’s big, busy globe-trotting life led to their split.“Our lifestyle was not in any way a negative,” she says. “That was not the problem. That is and will remain one of the wonderful opportunities we are able to give our children . . . They’re six very strong-minded, thoughtful, worldly individuals. I’m very proud of them.” For their sake, she is tight-lipped about the demise of the relationship, repeating the seemingly carefully crafted party line that “We care for each other and care about our family, and we are both working towards the same goal.” But Jolie does admit that by the summer of 2016 “things got bad”—and then promptly corrects herself. “I didn’t want to use that word . . . Things became ‘difficult.’ ”

She and the children are starting the new chapter of their lives in a $25 million estate once owned by iconic Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.An ethereal Jolie, in a “creamy-white, floor-length caftan” greets VF’s Evgenia Peretz at the “11,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion,” replete with fountains, a pool, rolling green hills, a fantasy library with a ladder seemingly lifted straight from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and a kitchen worthy of a “Nancy Meyers movie.” This is what moving on looks like when you’re Angelina Jolie. “It’s just been the hardest time, and we’re just kind of coming up for air. [This house] is a big jump forward for us, and we’re all trying to do our best to heal our family,” she says. The kids have “been very brave. They were very brave,” Jolie adds somewhat cryptically. “We’re all just healing from the events that led to the filing . . . They’re not healing from divorce. They’re healing from some . . . from life, from things in life.”

The famous Jolie-Pitt children are all grown up.Maddox, once known as the toddler photographed playing in the sand with Pitt and Jolie in their very first photos on a Kenyan beach, is now 15, and recently served as an executive producer on Jolie’s forthcoming Netflix film, First They Killed My Father, based on Loung Ung’s 2000 memoir. Knox, 9, presses Jolie mid-interview about erecting a waterslide (“How about a ‘Hello, Mom’?” she quips), as Vivienne, his twin sister, returns from a sleepover. Knox delivered some sage advice, Jolie says, after she recently advised him to “pretend to be normal”: “He said, ‘Who wants to be normal? We’re not normal. Let’s never be normal.’ Thank you—yes! We’re not normal. Let’s embrace being not normal!”

Jolie has reconciled with her long-estranged father, Voight.“He’s been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time. I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around,” she says. “He knows kind of the rule: Don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.”

Jolie is taking a break from work and is in the midst of a serious domestic phase. Including, at the request of her children, taking cooking classes.“There’s the chaos surrounding the practical day-to-day—playdates, doctors appointments, packing and unpacking, and organizing mealtimes,” she says, sounding like a suburban mom in Anytown, USA. “I’ve been trying for nine months to be really good at just being a homemaker and picking up dog poop and cleaning dishes and reading bedtime stories. And I’m getting better at all three.” Instead of diving back into acting or directing, “I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. As I go to sleep at night, I think, Did I do a great job as a mom or was that an average day?”

And in a particularly shocking revelation to fans of the star's street style, Jolie shares that last year she developed, and eventually recovered from, Bell’s Palsy, “a result of damage to facial nerves, causing one side of her face to droop.”The paparazzi did not capture her condition, and Jolie says that acupuncture completely healed her. “Sometimes women in families put themselves last,” she says, “until it manifests itself in their own health.” But despite what she says are more gray hairs and drier skin after a difficult year, “I actually feel more of a woman because I feel like I’m being smart about my choices, and I’m putting my family first, and I’m in charge of my life and my health,” she says. “I think that’s what makes a woman complete.”