35 Interesting Facts About Angelina Jolie

Prior to making the film Beyond Borders (2003), Angelina Jolie did volunteer work for the same United Nations organization her character plays in the film. She was ultimately named a UN goodwill ambassador and in 2003 published some journals she wrote of her experiences, titled “Notes from My Travels”, to raise funds for refugee relief. Some of the places she writes about are featured in this movie.

2. The filming of the movie By the Sea (2015) took place during Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's honeymoon in Malta. In fact, the couple paid £120,000 to locals to leave the island of Gozo in Malta so that they could spend some time alone.

3. Angelina Jolie has a hobby of collecting knives and has an interest in mortuary science. In fact, she’s collected knives ever since she was a young girl.

4. Model Rachel Bernstein was the CGI body double used for Angelina Jolie’s nude scenes in the 2007 movie Beowolf.

5. Angelina Jolie once tried to hire a hitman to kill her, because she felt that a murder would be easier on her family than her committing suicide. The would-be-hitman talked her out of it by asking her to wait a month.

In Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Angelina Jolie had to wear bra padding, in order for her bust size to measure up to the videogame character. Jolie wore considerably less (and possibly no) padding in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, as the decision was made to give Lara more realistic dimensions.

7. Angelina Jolie adopted her son Maddox during the filming of Beyond Borders (2003) while in Cambodia.

8. Lara Croft's father in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) was played by Angelina Jolie’s real-life father, Jon Voight. Angelina Jolie’s birth name is Angelina Jolie Voight.

9. Four of Angelina Jolie's children, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Pax Jolie-Pitt, Knox Jolie-Pitt, and Zahara Jolie-Pitt, were voice extras on the movie Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) when Po talks to the pandas about a game plan.

10. Angelina Jolie had a mastectomy due to having an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian cancer. Her chance of developing breast cancer dropped from 87% to under 5% after the mastectomy.

Brad Pitt reportedly left from acting in Mr. & Mrs. Smith after Nicole Kidman was dropped out and her replacement had not yet been found. Once Angelina Jolie signed on, he returned to the project.

12. Angelina Jolie purchased 60,000 hectares of Cambodian land that was infiltrated by poachers and turned it into a wildlife reserve. Some of the former poachers were then employed as rangers. In recognition of her conservation efforts, King Norodom Sihamoni awarded Cambodian citizenship to Jolie in 2005.

13. Angelina Jolie is left-handed and therefore had to have guns specially made so that she could reload them easily for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001).

14. Angelina Jolie took drug tests during the filming of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) to test her mental well-being during filming, due to concerns about the rumors of drug use, and her relationship with Billy Bob Thornton.

15. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt sold the rights for the first images of their twins to People and Hello! magazines for $14 million, making them the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken. The money went to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

The 2010 movie Salt was originally written with Salt as a male (Edwin A. Salt), and Tom Cruise was approached to play him. Ultimately, he backed out and the script was rewritten with a female lead and Angelina Jolie was cast.

17. Angelina Jolie married Jonny Lee Miller in 1996 in black leather pants and a white blouse. On the white blouse, she painted her husband's name in her own blood (across the back), using a surgical needle.

18. Before the sex scene in the movie Original Sin (2001) was filmed, Angelina Jolie told the director that she would only film the scene if she was fully naked and without tapes or anything else to cover her up. Antonio Banderas also decided to do the scene fully naked. This meant that a lot of footage filmed for the scene, however, could not be used in the film because it was just too graphic and explicit to show onscreen. This was also where the rumor started about how Jolie and Banderas had unsimulated sex, which was said to have been another reason for why the scene was cut down. The director said he still had a copy of the original cut of the film which, amongst other deleted scenes, also included the original uncut sex scene, but those scenes have never been released.

19. Angelina Jolie has herself admitted that she scared little kids while in costume on the set of Maleficent, with one kid actually saying, “Mommy, please get the mean witch to stop talking to me.” Her daughter, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, who played young Aurora, was the only child who was not scared of her.

20. Colin Farrell who played Angelina Jolie’s son in the movie Alexander (2004) was just a year younger than her. Also for that movie, Angelina Jolie was to be clothed exactly as a woman of Olympias’ time. Her costume included a long dress and shawl that would have fully covered her entire body, including her hair. Jolie objected strongly and insisted her character wear far less clothing to emphasize her sexual power.

In order to get a wider PG-13 audience for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a very steamy sex scene between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie was cut.

22. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt married on August 23, 2014 in Château Miraval, the couple's estate in France. By the Sea (2015) marked the first time since the wedding that they appeared together in a feature film and they divorced a year later. This actually continued an urban myth which states that married celebrity couples appearing in films together often end up divorcing each other. Other notable examples include Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman following Eyes Wide Shut (1999); Madonna and Sean Penn following Shanghai Surprise (1986); and Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor after Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004).

23. Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie who co-starred ‘The Tourist’ (2010), both saw their marriages fall apart in 2016. Angelina Jolie surprised everybody by initiating divorce proceedings from Brad Pitt, following altercations over the rearing of their children, while Johnny Depp's marriage to Amber Heard came to an acrimonious end in the full glare of the tabloids.

24. Angelina Jolie avoided any communication with Winona Ryder when making ‘Girl, Interrupted (1999)’, claiming that if she saw anything human about Ryder, she would not have been able to act out the sociopath character Lisa Rowe as effectively. She won Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in this movie.

25. Angelina Jolie has admitted in interviews that she shot nude scenes for the movie ‘The Bone Collector (1999),’ but director Phillip Noyce cut them, feeling they distracted from the story. Before that Angelina Jolie said something similar in an interview for a different film. She said that she filmed two sex scenes for the movie Playing God (1997), but that they were cut from the film.