There's sexy, and then there's scary-sexy.
Angelina Jolie certainly earns the extra adjective.
Those lips simultaneously pout and snarl, those eyes smolder, and her body seems specifically designed for seduction or attack.
That added sense of danger is what separates Jolie from all the other leading ladies of Hollywood. She frightens even as she tempts.
In Wanted, Jolie is going bad again.
She plays the aptly named Fox, a world-class assassin whose job is to recruit and protect McAvoy's character, a wimpy office clerk who has the supernatural power to bend the trajectory of bullets, into her fraternity of vengeance seekers.
The movie, a loose adaptation of a cult comic book, mixes gruesome violence with tongue-in-cheek touches of humor. Exhibit A: the ridiculousness of the chase scene.
At first, Jolie denies the scene's sexual overtones, then acknowledges: "Well, I am in a dress with my legs spread. Honestly, I think it comes across that way because I wasn't thinking about that at all. I loved it because she was somebody who has no time for boyfriends or relationships or sexuality or flirtation. She's not like that at all. It's like being with a solider."
What makes femmes fatales so appealing, she says, is they "tend to not be throwing themselves at somebody, and are not thinking about that."
She says playing someone who resists attention makes them, paradoxically, irresistible.
Fox "is not easy to get along with," Jolie says. "Because of that, and how casual she is with her body — she doesn't think twice about jumping across the hood of a car with a dress on — maybe that's what comes across."
She pauses and adds, "I just had to try to keep a straight face."
But all that detachment takes work. Jolie did an unusual thing to make Fox seem more distant and unattainable: cut many of her own lines.
"There are a lot of scenes where James is talking, talking, talking, and I say nothing," she says. "Or something's happening, and I'm eating a cheeseburger while he's being attacked. She has a fun sense of distance."
She has a theory about her subconscious motivation. "Maybe it was my attempt at being Clint Eastwood (who directs her in Changeling). Maybe I was secretly trying to channel the coolest person who says nothing."
Though the film is fantasy, Jolie says Fox's back story — her father was murdered by a criminal who had been marked for death but was allowed to go free — reflects an exaggerated version of her own beliefs.
"I have strong opinions, which I don't want to get into now, about international justice, about the death penalty, about people who get away with murder. There's a little bit of that in this story, it's kind of an underlying point, but the story doesn't get too heavy into it," she says. "I don't like action movies that take themselves too seriously. Those action movies where everybody is acting very cool and it's all very serious and the world is going to end? I tend to just giggle."
There was another part of herself that she was able to include in Fox — her many tattoos. "Instead of taking mine away, which we have to do in every film, we ended up leaving mine and adding more." Those temporary additions are on full display in one scene, where Fox emerges from a steaming bath and walks by stunned onlookers — again, not caring what they see.
"We tried to focus (the fake tattoos) on themes that would be related to this sense of justice. I have 'Strength of Will' in one language, and we added it in four other languages on my arm." "Know Your Rights" is printed in English on the back of her neck, and again in Latin as well. "From Churchill's speech 'We have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,' I had 'Toil' and 'Tears' here and here," she says, pointing to the undersides of her upper arms.
Wanted, Jolie says, is her break from more earnest performances as the wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart, an isolated housewife in the CIA drama The Good Shepherd and the mother of a missing boy in Changeling, which comes out Oct. 24 and could fuel Oscar talk.
She was happy to get back to an over-the-top action flick. As her manager, Geyer Kosinski, put it: "It's what people want to see her doing. She said, 'At some point, I have to get back to (sex) and killing.' "
Jolie says: "I've been so lucky in my career that I've been able to do a kind of Mr. & Mrs. Smith thing that's really cool, and I'm made up to be as pretty as I can be. But I can also do a film like Changeling or A Mighty Heart, where it's removed from that.
"There are those certain roles, like this role, where you joke with hair and makeup: 'All right, make me foxy,' " she says. "I think it's in every woman. It's the little girl in us. There's a side of us that likes to play dress-up and every once in a while get glammed up."
For now, Jolie says she's focusing on her role as doting mom.
She declined to confirm her due date, but she has very clear ideas about what the days and months leading up to the birth will be like.
"We've made a point to, both of us, not be working," she says. "So we'll be home together with the kids," Maddox, 6; Pax, 4; Zahara, 3; and Shiloh, who just turned 2.
"At the same time we're expecting two, we have four, so my focus now is on the four we have. And these are some big times for them, big moments in their lives. So every day is just about making sure that their schooling is going right and their manners are intact and we're disciplining properly and we're spending enough time with them individually, so they seem special. That's a lot of balance when you have a lot of children."
As for how Pitt is handling it all, she says, "I'm very lucky — I'm with a man who makes me feel very sexy pregnant and loves children. In the last few months it's hard for me to pick up the other kids, so he's there to help lift them up to me and things like that. He's an extremely hands-on dad with all the kids and really, really supportive. Any woman knows that when you're pregnant, if you have a partner who is embracing it with you and excited with you, it makes all the difference. I'm very lucky to have him."
Since Cannes, Jolie and Pitt have lately stayed out of sight on their new estate in the South of France, the vineyard castle Chateau Miraval.
But people haven't stopped talking about her. Reports, denied by her manager, earlier this month that she had given birth set off a media frenzy.
As she resists the attention, she becomes, paradoxically, irresistible.
Source:
Anthony Breznican,
USA Today
