Angelina Jolie Felt Repressed Playing a Woman in ‘The Good Shepherd’
Angelina Jolie’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith wasn’t the only spy movie she’s starred in. She was once cast in a very different thriller, The Good Shepherd. Unlike the former film, The Good Shepherd required her character to take a backseat to the male characters in the film. But Jolie admitted this was difficult adjusting to.
How Angelina Jolie felt about starring in ‘The Good Shepherd’
The Good Shepherd was a fictional version of the birth of the CIA in the 1960s. The feature saw Matt Damon playing the agent responsible for forming the organization, with Jolie cast as his love interest. The role was a huge departure from her usual characters.
Fans were accustomed to seeing Jolie portraying formidable and bold female leads that took charge. The Good Shepherd, however, would have her playing a much more subdued personality, which fit the behavior of many women at the time. Getting into a character who was so restrained was far from easy for the action star.
“I’m the sad housewife. It was different and it was hard not playing with the boys. And it was hard to be that kind of a woman. There was a certain repression at that time, and playing a woman like that was hard for me,” Jolie once told Indie London about the part.
Although Jolie asserted that she didn’t share much in common with her Good Shepherd counterpart, there was one similarity the two shared. Being a mother herself, the two found common ground when it came to parenthood.
“There was so much about her I didn’t identify with, but her love and commitment to her son and certainly having lost her own family to this world of CIA and now her husband and the fear that her son would get involved in this kind of dangerous silent world and that becoming a reality and how that would feel; so yeah, that would seem in particular, fighting for him was very personal,” Jolie once said according to Black Film.
Robert De Niro thought Angelina Jolie might’ve been too strong for ‘The Good Shepherd’
The Good Shepherd also saw Jolie collaborating with acting veteran Robert De Niro, who directed the feature. Initially, De Niro worried that Jolie wouldn’t be right for his film because of her personality. But she was eventually able to convince him to give her the opportunity. It helped that the Tomb Raider star found her character strong in her own right. It just might’ve taken a while for her to find that strength given the time period the film was set in.
“I do see her in the end as being as strong as a woman could be at that time, but I did like that there were already things about her that were broken and often I don’t get to play that part and that’s why it took a while for Bob, for us to decide that I should play that part because she is much subservient, and more vulnerable and she is very broken; and as actress, it’s a great challenge. As a woman, as much as certain in my life I could feel strong about this. There are pieces that are broken,” Jolie said.
Angelina Jolie’s stable family life helped her with ‘The Good Shepherd’
Although Jolie’s character was going through a turbulent marriage in the film, Jolie herself was happily married to Brad Pitt at the time. Ironically, the stability of Jolie’s family life back then helped her play a wife caught in a difficult relationship.
“Well, I do have two divorces,” Jolie joked. “But I’m still good friends with them, so it’s ok. I guess it was so much … I think it’s easier to play that kind of stuff when you do have a balance home; because I think if I did have alcoholism in my personal life, or my mother, or somebody close to me, if I did that experience, it might have been much more uncomfortable to get in there.”
