Meeting with Jon Voight's already-infamous daughter is a welcome slap in the face.
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Angelina Jolie gazes out into the Royalton lounge, a shallow pit of polished concrete lit from the floor up in a fan of hostile glamour. She sees people putting up with stylishly misshapen chairs and the forced coziness of two-starlet elevators. Bellboys dressed like gravediggers in a Terrence McNally version of Hamlet.
Faces bobbing above a wake of Manhattan basic black. Weariness has her massaging her own hands, moving them the way kids do to make shadow doves on the wall. The six-day shoots for The Bone Collector (she plays a detective in search of a serial killer) have her shuttling from New York to Montreal on the Canuck red-eye, and if that isn't enough, she's starring in the picture with the talented but notoriously intense Denzel Washington (who plays a quadriplegic). She looks like a cross between one of the beleaguered air traffic controllers in her recently completed Pushing Tin and her dad in Midnight Cowboy when he realizes that Ratso Rizzo is dead. She looks sad.
Someone with as fully realized a presence as Angelina - with that figure, was she conceived in outer space, like the perfect ball bearing, or what? - should not be unhappy.
"Listen," I offer, "you wanna do something really cool?"
"Sure," she smiles, using the entirety of that mouth. It is an amazing mouth, but the minute you hear Angelina, you realize it's the texture of her voice you get hooked on, bumpy and slippery, like tapioca and Rice Krispies. "Hey, you ask me some good questions, I'll answer them."
"What're good questions? There are no good questions."
"New questions."
"Nah, there are no new questions. What? Did you love your director? What was your motivation? Is there a God? Do you like your eggs runny? What brought you to this role? That's dreck--right? But--BUT! There's one thing we can do that would probably reveal more about you than anything you could tell me."
"You wanna go have sex?" She's kidding. "I'm kidding, I'm kid-ding." She's kidding. "Well, what? What, what? Tell me what it is."
"OK. I want you to slap me."
Angelina is blinking. I think she understands the request, because her hands--big, pass-catching hands--slide over her thighs as if she's looking for her pockets.
"It's OK. I'm asking you to slap me. Can you do that?"
"Well ... yeah," she nods, containing herself. "Backhand?"
"No. No knuckles. Just a good old-fashioned slap. And don't hold back. I want your lifeline tattooed on my cheek."
"Are you gonna smack me back?"
This is a fine question, although asked without any terrible concern, more with the uncertainty of doing a jigsaw puzzle when the box lid with the whole picture on it is missing.
OK. She's left-handed, so it's gonna come from the north. I'm ready, got the chin teed up for her. Angelina lets her arm dangle loose. She composes herself for a brief second. And then WHACK!
She certainly seems to have found her motivation, because the contact lens in my right eye buckles and has to swim through the tears to its former home.
"Wow. That was good, Ms. Jolie--"
"Thank you! Call me Angelina."
"Angelina. But I made a mistake. I had my eyes closed. I'm afraid you're gonna have to do it again. I'm not into pain or anything, I just ... need to see you. OK?"
"OK, no problem."
"Well--do it. Hit me."
"Yeah, but you can't be expecting it ... can't be expecting it," she repeats to herself, as if she's lost her train of thought. But then WHACK! It was all a ploy to catch me off-guard. And this time she wound up, put some heat on her fastball and hit me so hard I'm smelling toast, like she shook loose memory traces lodged in my brain pan. And it was loud, a slap heard 'round the Royalton. Half the people in our vicinity avert their eyes out of the tacit social etiquette that makes everybody look as if they're saying grace. The ones who stare probably recognize Angelina as that actress with the lips who starred in HBO's Gia, the biopic of junkie supermodel Gia Carangi (she got Emmy-nominated for that). Or the actress who played Gary Sinise's second wife on TNT's George Wallace (she was Emmy-nominated for that, too, and she won a Golden Globe). Maybe one or two of them recognize her as the shared love interest of David Duchovny and Timothy Hutton in Playing God.
"So, how did that feel?" I ask her. She takes a little mental stroll around the Canadian wilderness to mull it over, then she's back. "Good," she's decided. My thinking here is, how could it be otherwise, but it's her party. "Did you have rage?"
"Oh no, not at all. I think it feels good to come in contact with somebody."
"So ... have you ever done that to anyone before?"
"Yeah," she grins, "yeah. Usually it's with someone I know better, but, yeah... I think you should be able to, well, touch with authority. If you're gonna attack somebody, I'm more into hitting. But if I'm in love with somebody, I'm more into slapping. But not the face ... and pushing ... you know, not from across the room, but, more ... connected ... know what I'm saying here? The slap ... reminded me of a lot of things. I felt a lot of things. Do you ... ?"
"Oh no, I'm fine. You don't have to hit me anymore, or have sex with me. But bearing that in mind ... when was the last time you were terrified?"
"God ... terrified. Scared? About a year ago, I was really scared. When I finished Gia and I did certain things." She lapses into a kind of code-speak here, which she tends to do. It requires some getting used to. I'm not sure what these "things" might be. "I moved to New York, didn't know anybody and didn't know if I was gonna even be an actor anymore, went to school, didn't know if I would miss being an actor. There were lots of terrifying moments, lots of uplifting moments, but for a few months, which included spending a Christmas alone ... being on the subway a lot ... I was terrified of being on my own."
There have been more recent fears, some perhaps more founded than others. She was scared doing her role as a passionate club crawler who falls for Ryan Phillippe in Playing by Heart. She thought there was nothing particularly funny or bright about her. Hey, maybe she's scared in advance about playing a hostile, troubled woman on Winona Ryder's mental ward in Girl Interrupted. She's certainly harboring elaborate insecurities over her present effort in The Bone Collector---about not doing her job, not figuring her character out in time, not knowing how to deal with the fact that it doesn't "feel like an actor's movie."
"I had a thing with a writer"she's using code again; by "thing" Angelina here means disagreement"that grew out of the fact that I wrote a scene and he wrote a scene and we couldn't come to grips as to which scene was gonna get used. I was in my cop character and I'd been wearing guns for the past year, so I said, 'OK, come on, let's just take it outside and whoever wins can do their scene.' You get to a point in this business where everyone just kind of skirts around each other and everyone talks to everybody else instead of who they should be talking to, and nobody's able to be straight with the other person, so nothing happens and nobody commits to anything solid. Well, that just kept happening, so I got frustrated. And I said, 'Let's take it outside.' It sounded like a damn good idea at the time."
If Angelina had some insecurities on a little ensemble picture like Playing by Heart, and on a straightforward cop drama like The Bone Collector, how did she survive the free-for-all of Pushing Tin? The level of comedic sophistication in this story of dueling hotshot traffic controllers is said to be in the stratosphere. And the other people dealing with the blips and quips along with her were the always smart John Cusack, Oscar-winning Arkansas hyphenate Billy Bob Thornton, serious Australian sensation Cate Blanchett and director Mike Newell, the guy who single-handedly put Hugh Grant on everybody's radar screen and then gave us Donnie Brasco. You know Pushing Tin is not going to be just a holding pattern.
"Actually, I was quite happy," Angelina says of that endeavor. "See, Pushing Tin came along just as I was coming out of my dark period. I was really very happy on that set. It was free, it was fun, I had fun with the character, not to mention great people around me. But getting back to the fear thing--that's what I live for. That's why asking me about fear is such a strange question. It's important to be terrified trying things I've never done. So that's the fun of it, but that's the scary part, too."
And the feeling part. Above all, the feeling part. Even if you haven't been slapped by her, you're bound to get the sense that Angelina likes/needs to feel. At the moment, she's staring a stigmata hole into her palm, while the couple with the mango-colored martinis and the $300 haircuts can't keep their eyes off her. If they looked closer, they'd find a young woman tough in the way you have to be to reckon with taxes, and vulnerable in the way you have to be to get your garden to grow. Those two ways of being share borders, like that illusory drawing which can be seen as either two candlesticks or the silhouette of a lady, depending. Hard to say what decides which reality dominates at any given moment in the actress's life, but this much seems certain: she knows full well that when you spend your life pretending to be other people, your own behavior becomes an odd affair.
"In real life I find myself not so much acting, but certainly being dramatic," she says. "Especially if I find myself in a situation where it's really emotional, or I have to be real. Like I had to tell a girlfriend her dog died and somehow in doing it, I was studying her reaction instead of being there for her. Or if I have somebody that I'm helping and they're sick, I'll say 'Come over and I'll take care of you,' but somehow I'm selfish because I'll end up watching them, you know? Not good.
"Acting is a weird reality, to be sure," she continues. "My first wedding was on-screen. I've had more onscreen relationships with men than I've had in my entire life. And now, not so uncoincidentally, I have this weird thing with intimacy. When I did Wallace with Gary Sinise, there was a part where he was sick and we shot it at this hospital--and that became my image of a hospital. It felt real to me, even though it was far from it. But now, in real life, if I visit someone in a hospital, it's this initial feeling like it's fake--it's not real and they're not really sick. The clincher--a while ago I got sick enough to be hospitalized, and I wound up in the same hospital where we shot Wallace.
"Yeah," she says, and her voice goes lower, "you could say my sense of reality is more than a little warped."
The actor Jon Voight and the actress Marcheline Bertrand made a point of giving their children middle names in the event that later in life son James Haven (born in 1973) or daughter Angelina Jolie (born in 1975) found the surname Voight too much of an obstacle to overcome. A divorce when the children were just toddlers may have proven a bigger handicap for their daughter than any name could have been, but, as Angelina likes to say today, "Why sodomize dragonflies?" At age seven, Jon Voight's little girl made her acting debut in Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, a film cowritten and coproduced by her father. By the time she was 14, she was a two-year veteran of the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. Throughout Angelina's teenage years, the acting bug flared up and went dormant by turns; the bug she couldn't quite shake was the effect of her parents' divorce. It made for a stormy relationship with her father. "We had a heavy relationship because we were so much alike," she says.
"With every divorced family there are things. They're gonna be your parent, but you're easy for them to accept as a friend. And you have issues, and they need to be forgiven for things and you do--and you need to come back together and really go through ... and with me and him, it was always just who we were. I had a therapist in school--I thought it was extra credit to take drug group and private therapy so I took it. And my therapist just really, really wanted to blame everything, all my problems, on my father. She thought it was impossible for me to be adjusted because my parents were divorced. I thought I was managing, but she just wanted to get to it, know what I mean? I came in one day and told her I'd had this dream that I stabbed my father with a fork, and she was just thrilled. She was, like, happy I killed my parent. 'Now we're getting somewhere.' That was the end of my therapy. Today if I need to work things out I just drive a car around for a couple hours."
By the time she hit the legal age of 18, Angelina had already decided once and for all on becoming a real, live actress. Cyborg 2 featured her in her first costarring role as a hybrid Data/Xena character. The cast of that film included Jack Palance, 'nuff said. She began to hit her stride as "Acid Burn" in the Gen-Net ensemble thriller Hackers (1995). Then she really came into her own as Legs Sadovsky in the screen adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's novel Foxfire (1996), the story of an all-girl high school gang fighting for their rights to be an all-girl high school gang...fighting for their rights. The next year Angelina won a Golden Globe award for her performance as the second wife of the wheelchair-bound governor of Alabama in the TNT biopic George Wallace. Besides being good, her performance could have single-handedly revitalized the Freudians. Father Jon, recall, won an Oscar for his gutsy portrayal of an embittered Vietnam vet--paralyzed from the waist down--in Coming Home.
Angelina had the distinction of being cast as David Duchovny's leading lady in Playing God, though it didn't do her or him any good. She was sorely underused in the part--which, to hear Angelina tell it, was probably a good thing: "I had sex scenes that were cut, but left in the trailer--how's that for a level of reality that rivals eating your foot to stay alive? It's like, we have sex in our movie, but we really don't, but go see the movie."
"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.