Angelina Jolie: Tres Jolie

"What was wrong with the sex scenes?"

"I had one with Tim [Hutton] and one with David. My gut feeling was they cut the Tim sex scene because they decided they wanted to make a clean, action-type film. I thought it should've been about two people who change each other, like Pretty Woman. People love the idea of changing each other, don't they?"

"What about the scene with Duchovny?"

"My character had just gotten shot and I couldn't move because I had a purple breast. And there were like, a thousand candles. They always do that--put all these candles in the big sex scenes. I have never had sex like that in real life, yar know? Listen to me. 'Yar.' My accent is so fucked up right now, it's all over the place. My accent is supposed to be 'New Yawk' for Bone Collector, but if I have one drink it drifts into Southern. And if I'm with Jonny too much, I go British."

That would be husband Jonny, actor Jonny Lee Miller, who gave Trainspotting such a shot in the arm. Angelina met him on the set of Hackers and they were married in 1996. It's no use busting Angelina for hooking up with an actor.

"Look," she says. "It's a specific type of personality that goes into this job. As actors, you have a lot in common and you expose yourselves to each other emotionally. You see into each other pretty quickly. And you have down time where you get to know each other, so it's kind of an ideal situation. You get to know each other at a really deep level."

All right then. Marrying a fellow actor is almost a sure fate. And being the daughter of an actor makes for something even stranger--a lifelong shape-shifting between the actual and the staged. In the heady times just before the airing of George Wallace, Angelina did a Q & A for Interview magazine, and it was her father who was asking the questions.

"The magazine mentioned all these actors [I could be interviewed by] and I thought, 'Well, who's the one person I actually want to know what they know about me?' It was him. I mean, normally, we haven't sat down and asked each other, 'OK, what is it you'd like to know about me?' without it becoming, 'Why are you asking me that and what does that relate to?' There was always this big thing with him that if we just met on the street and we were strangers, how would we perceive each other, how would we get to know each other as people instead of father and daughter? I believed we needed to talk to each other and be straight to each other like friends, too. To get to know each other by debating things, teaching each other what we each learn--to take note of each other's existence, separate from each other--that's what the Interview thing was all about."

So, despite all the tough times after the divorce, Angelina is close to her father now. She got faxes from the set of Noah's Ark, where Voight filmed the lead for next year's televised miniseries about the first man on earth to say, "I'll take two of everything." But it's not all smoothed out--she won't see Coming Home, a film Voight made during a particularly difficult time in his personal life that must have affected her too. Of Voight's considerable body of work, Angelina loves Conrack, Runaway Train and, despite protestations from friends, Anaconda.

"I loved Anaconda. It's not the greatest movie, but he really had his sense of humor, and that alone meant the world to me. Also, I had a pet snake when I was little. I had lizards and snakes all my life. So, here he's the guy in love with the snake--it was like this little message."

In her father's whole gallery of portrayals, though, the most revealing for Angelina was his Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy. There's one scene in particular, the dream sequence at the end when Joe's running on the beach in Florida ....

"It gets me every time," she says, "because he is a very serious person, he's so into the search for information, and it was so nice to see him just flying free and playing and trying things and not thinking about too much and not being so much on a search for why things are ... but what they are, you know? It makes me cry every time I see him running."

As we're walking out of a hotel Joe Buck would never have gotten to walk into, Angelina talks about the possibility of someday interviewing her own offspring in print.

"I'm pretty sure I won't be having children," she confesses, "because I don't know if there's ever not gonna be a time when I'm not gonna be selfish. See, the reality of being a single parent is with me...until I'm ready to give a solid 20 years and not do anything that could risk my life or not be about me, well, you know when you have kids your life is about somebody else. I could adopt--I'm not this big blood person. I almost feel closer to someone who's not blood, because the relationship came out of nothing preconceived.

"The only thing I'm good at, seriously? Is living every single day as fully as possible. Doing every possible thing I can damn well do for the people I love at every moment--make some big decisions quick, spit them out and move on."

We embrace as we say good-bye--she hugs better than she hits, which is tremendously encouraging.

"Listen," I ask, "Were you OK with the slap?"

"Me? Sure ... I mean ... you asked for it."

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Michael Angeli wrote about sex in the movies for the February 98 issue of Movieline.

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