How Angelina Jolie Started Getting Into Character
At the start of rehearsals, “they were putting us together and trying outfits on us, seeing how we look as a couple,” Jolie told Vogue, about a week after she met Pitt. “It’s always so silly; you don’t know somebody and in three days you’re going to be ‘married.’ But he’s lovely, Brad Pitt. He’s very sweet.”
She described Mr. & Mrs. Smith as “a study in marriage and how well you know your partner. There’s everything from couples therapy to arguing about the drapes, and you think they’re having affairs, and then you slowly discover that the reason they’re having problems is because they have very different lives and have secrets from each other.”
At the time, Pitt had been married to Jennifer Aniston since 2000 and Jolie was twice-divorced, from Jonny Lee Miller in 1999 and Billy Bob Thornton in 2003, each after about three years of marriage.
“My opinion of marriage comes from a very cynical place,” Jolie explained. “Do you want to kill your spouse? For me, that’s a serious question. And Brad Pitt comes from a place of: What a funny idea, to kill the person you’re married to, because he has a happy marriage. So we’re actually a very funny combination.”
She drew from her past to inform her character. “For me, it was a lot of thinking about old relationships I had—marriages I had,” she told EW before the movie came out in June 2005, “and thinking, Oh, that’s the point where I wanted to kill that person.”
