Angelina Jolie: Touched by an Angelina

"I was surprised by how comfortable you looked during your lesbian love scenes in Gia," I say. "Most actresses look like they're squirming inside when they do that stuff."

"I wasn't uncomfortable," says Jolie with a laugh. "It's just not one of the things that makes me feel awkward. I also had a scene with a woman in Foxfire, but when the reviews came out, basically all they said was: 'Angelina Jolie has great tits.'"

"In Gia you show more than that, including your tattoos," I say.

"Well, not all of them," she says and then stands up right in front of me, takes down her pants, pulls her undies aside and shows me the tattoo you're not likely to see unless Jolie decides to do some hard-core porn. We both start to laugh.

"Is that disgusting?" Jolie asks, zipping up her pants. "Should I have not shown that to you?"

"It's not too often that someone pulls their panties down for me," I say, deciding it's time to change the subject. "You know, I've watched all your movies, and I have to say, you are completely unrecognizable from one role to the next."

Jolie thinks it over. "I think of myself as a character actress," she says.

"Well," I tell her, "Hollywood can't look at a woman as gorgeous as you and not see her as a leading lady. They just wouldn't know what to do with you."

"That's why I'm here in New York," says Jolie. "I came because I wanted to go back to school. After Gia, I realized that I wasn't likely to soon find a role that could compare to that. Then the Stones asked me if I wanted to do their video, and it was great, because I had just shaved my head for the dying scenes in Gia, and I've never felt so not sexy. But it was so cool to be thought of as a Stones girl." Jolie has a dreamy look on her face, and seems to have forgotten the point of her story.

"So, school..." I say, feeling like her teacher.

"Oh, yeah. I think if you act in enough movies where other people always choose the moment, you start to think that sometimes they've chosen all the wrong moments. Why are we on the long shot when that really important moment was happening inside me? So I'm going to NYU, taking techniques and technologies of film, film production and screenwriting. It's been fun. My mom walked me to school the first day and she was laughing, because I had always been terrible at school, and here I was with my backpack. But I think I'll be a better actress because of this. I didn't want to get caught in the wave of my career and then just get dumped off somewhere else. I want a little control."

"Who doesn't?" I ask.

"Whenever I read about how an actor wants more control, I just roll my eyes and think, 'sure.' But going back to school can't hurt me, and I always wanted to live in New York City."

"Do you have a lot of friends here?"

"None," she says in a small voice.

"They're all back in L.A.?"

"No, I don't have any there, either."

"How is that possible?" I ask her. "I've only been here for half an hour, and already I feel like we're friends."

"I never really made any good friends in one place because I've been on movie sets for years and those people become your family. Sometimes that's great, because you get all these terrific people around you, and sometimes it's not. My best experience was on Wallace. Gary Sinise made all of us feel so great. He made that set into the most supportive family, the best group of people. That was a risky role for me, and yet I never felt that way because Gary was such a terrific friend and coworker. I can't say enough nice things about him. [But] I think as actors, we go through groups of friends. We commit to the moment so much in our lives and in our work that we're friends with who we're working with at the moment. Maybe I just don't know how to carry them into the next stage of my life."

Jolie could be talking about her husband--she's been married for a year to Jonny Lee Miller, her costar in Hackers. He's still back in L.A. "We both needed time to grow up" is all Jolie cares to say on the subject, but she shows me some wedding photos. She wore pants made out of rubber and a white shirt with her husband's name spelled out on the shirt in her own blood. It probably seemed like a great idea at the time.

All of a sudden, through the window, we hear a man yell, a car swerve and a police car start its siren.

"Isn't this great?" asks Jolie. "I never realized how romantic New York is, because sometimes it's so lonely. But there's this guy who plays the saxophone outside my window at night. I sit in my living room in the middle of the night drinking tea and reading, and then look out the window--there's the moon and the saxophone, and it is just so incredibly sad. I feel like I'm toughening up and I'm waking up a little to different things."

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