Angelina Jolie steps up as a CIA operative in the action-packed summer film Salt. She says she was surprised a studio would back a woman in the lead role of an action film. columbia pictures Columbia Pictures
The woman in question is always right in front of everyone's eyes, but still they persist in asking: Who is she?
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It applies to both the suspected double agent Angelina Jolie plays in the spy thriller Salt and to the actress herself, one of the world's most famous women -- though the world, insatiably, perpetually, wants to know more.
She has obliged the curiosity by defying easy identification.
The gothic, spooky ingénue turned seductive femme-fatale siren turned female action hero, she's also the mother of six, a daring U.N. goodwill ambassador who travels regularly to violent and impoverished nations, and companion to a man who makes the rest of his gender look like cartoon drawings.
Her screen characters have a lot to live up to.
In Salt, opening Friday, Jolie is once again in attack mode as a CIA operative suspected of being a mole for a Russian sleeper cell that is trying to restart the Cold War as something a little more hot. Is she wrongly accused? A traitor playing innocent?
The movie's sinister twists are what intrigued the actress.
"I loved that she wasn't completely good. There's something about that," Jolie says, smiling warmly. "Not to say that's me. But there's certainly a side of me that isn't completely ..." She searches for the word.
"Sane," she chooses. "Or completely 'even' all the time."
Her eyebrows lift, just slightly, over intense eyes. She smiles again.
"We all have our dark sides," she says.
As someone whose identity has shifted dramatically over the years, it's obvious why Evelyn Salt would appeal to her. While the rest of the world questions Salt, doubts her, cheers for her or roots against her, only the woman herself knows her true motivation. Jolie is the same way.
"My evolution, and any extremes in my evolution, has been my personality, out of the nature of what's inside me," Jolie says. "I'm very unaware of my public self. I don't read anything written about me. I don't look at magazines. I only watch the films and premieres if I have to. I still haven't seen some of my films.
"If you become aware of a public self, you're in danger of becoming a very artificial person."
In person, Jolie, 35, is delicate in a way that seems the antithesis of her furious screen alter egos.
At a suite in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington neighborhood Georgetown, not far from where she shot many of Salt's chase scenes through the capital, she has trouble sliding a steel coffee table closer to the hotel room couch for her water.
Try to do it for her, however, and you realize --damn, that table is heavy. She purses her lips in a playful smile that seems to ask: Who's delicate now?
The surprising adjective for this iconic screen vixen in real life is ... sweet. Her smile, when it really turns on, is big and goofy. Genuine.
It comes out when she spots a picture of a baby on a stranger's cellphone, reaching out for it: "Is that your daughter? ... Oh. So cuuuuute."
With 2-year-old twins at home, she looks at the picture again and asks, almost conspiratorially, how the baby's hat manages to stay on. When told it doesn't, she leans back on the couch, nodding knowingly.
Liev Schreiber, who co-stars in Salt as a CIA colleague, says parenthood is a surefire way to bond with the enigmatic actress.
"I get uncomfortable and nervous around beautiful women and famous people," jokes the actor, who has two sons with actress Naomi Watts. "So Angelina presented kind of a problem for me. But we bonded very quickly over kids, since we both have children. We'd be shooting and then we'd stop, and she'd be like, 'Oh, you're doing timeouts, too?' ... 'Oh, that -- it's just teething, don't worry' "
When talk turns from parenthood to her, Jolie seems a little disappointed. A slight on-the-record formality creeps in, though it loosens whenever the line of questioning does. You might expect her to be guarded about her home life, but she's passionate and eager to talk about it -- except when people are cruel.
Then she turns protective.
That's a major part of her identity -- warm, but fierce -- that she gets from her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died in 2007. Jolie says the performance in her last film, 2008's Changeling, as a mother searching for her missing boy, was inspired by her own mom. "That was very cathartic for me. I wish she would have seen it," Jolie says. "That was very much her: All of her strength was in the way she loved her children. She wasn't a very strong person, but touch her children and she would rise up."
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SOURCE: USA Today - Anthony Breznican
