It's a relaxed, beautiful and supremely confident Angelina Jolie who walks into her Four Seasons hotel room in Los Angeles. The Oscar-winning actress is here to talk about her new action pic, Lara Croft:Tomb Raider.
This whiz-bang adaptation of the popular video game is Jolie at her best. It's the first time since the Alien films that a woman has been allowed to drive an action picture and playing Lara Croft was a dream come true for the actress.
"I saw the film for the first time yesterday," she says, "and all I could think about was how much I missed being her and travelling and all the things we did every day. It was great."
Jolie plays Lara Croft, daughter of a British aristocrat (played by Jolie's real-life dad Jon Voight). Playing such an empowering female character was a liberating and fun experience for her. "This film was great to do and it was so much fun," she says. "But, even through the process of it, we didn't want it to become too jokey."
Indeed, as powerful a character Lara Croft is, no attempt has been made to hide the character's sexuality and, for Jolie, that was half the fun with this film. "Almost every other suggestion for a movie I've done has been for a short, brown haircut and leather pants because that's what a tough girl is," explains the actress.
"A tough girl couldn't possibly be a curvaceous woman who also is comfortable with her sexuality. And so many women are, 'We don't like the woman who's comfortable with her body and flirtatious because that means she doesn't like other women or that means she's too flirty. We're not comfortable with her.'
"The reality is, nobody actually knows what sexual preference she had. That's one reality. And the thing is, she's just free. More than anything, she's athletic. She has the things that make her Lara Croft. The entire movie was made for the people that like her. It's one of those movies you do where, when there's a moment where you finally accomplish something, you want them to be with you and rooting for you. That's what it's for. She's become a real person," says Jolie.
"We were aware of all the things that people are looking for, like whether there was a shower scene, so we didn't ignore that and put a bit of it in, but didn't really show her body, didn't really do anything overly sexual. Part of the character's look came in the form - how can one put this? - her breasts, which have been commented on a lot, but which are a dominant component of the character.
"Personally, I wouldn't want those breasts. She's one cup size bigger than me. I'm a 36C, she's a 36D. In the game, she's a DD, so we took it down, but still just gave her some proper padding, but it's one cup size up from me. Ah, the things one discusses in interviews."
Jolie gets to do some physically demanding stuff in this movie, and training was part of the deal. "We had the two-and-a-half months before filming and then all through filming we were training," says the actress. "I had a bedroom and a living room and the living room was taken out for a boxing bag and a pull-up bar and a bunch of power bars for, like, eight months. I would call my husband (actor/director Billy Bob Thornton) and say, I want a cheeseburger and some pancakes."
It would have been easy to shoot Tomb Raider entirely on sets or in local British locations that double for the exotic locales in which much of the film was set. But Tomb Raider was shot on location in both Cambodia and Iceland, which provided diverse opportunities for Jolie. "I really missed Cambodia when we were done with the film," she recalls, with a laugh. "I miss that every day was so freeing; I recommend it for anybody.
"It's just such a freeing thing to set these great challenges for yourself, to travel, to learn more about the world, to just go out there and get crazy and free and get strong. It was wonderful that every day was about learning something new and trying to overcome some obstacle. It's just a great feeling."
Jolie is preparing to take a break. She has another film, Original Sin, due out later this year and is shooting Life Or Something Like It in Vancouver, but she is content to spend more time with her husband which, these days, is becoming increasingly important to her.
"Family is what grounds you," she says. "It's a real life that you have together and memories you build and share, so we want more time together. I'm going on tour with him in August when he does his music at House of Blues."
- Paul Fischer