Angelina Jolie Once Shared It Was Exhausting Being an Acting Coach for Her Daughter
Angelina Jolie had to play the role of a stage coach when her daughter Vivienne ended up in the feature Maleficent. But teaching her daughter how to act was easier said than done.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had to show their daughter how to perform
Jolie and Pitt’s daughter Vivienne made her onscreen debut in the Disney film Maleficent, where Jolie famously played the fairy tale villain. Vivienne portrayed Princess Aurora in the flick and had her parents by her side to help inspire their daughter’s performance. But Jolie asserted that this was easier said than done.
“She was trying to catch the butterfly, which was a day that I wasn’t working, so mummy and daddy had to be, like, the set parents, trying to get her to do everything,” Jolie once said according to Contact Music. “I was holding the stick with the blue thing on it and, like, kinda dancing and making her follow me and Brad was on the edge of the cliff, kinda singing and… trying to get her to dance into his arms. We were exhausted by the end of that day. It was so hard.”
How Angelina Jolie’s kids helped her ‘Maleficent’ performance
Jolie not only helped Vivienne with her Maleficent performance, but it seems Vivienne and Jolie’s other kids helped her as well. Motherhood and her own childhood already played a big role in luring Jolie into doing the Disney feature in the first place.
“And, I was moved by it, as a mother,” Jolie once said according to Trippin with Tara. “But I was also really moved by it because I thought of myself as a little girl, and I thought of all the kids I know, and I just think of that feeling different, feeling outside, and also as a woman, feeling abused and this ideal if you’ve ever been abused and then you kind of as a woman you put this wall up. And you become darker and you’re not able to be this soft person that you were born to be. And then what could possibly ever bring you back? And the thing that brings her back is very much the thing that brought me back. And so, I was very, very connected to it.”
Jolie’s kids only helped her further connect with the story by developing Maleficent’s voice.
“I always tell stories, which I’m sure we all do,” she said. “Well all of us have a few voices. I tell them stories and I was giving them baths and I was doing this thing where a few nights in a row I would tell them stories in the bath and I was trying out voices. A few they’d say, please stop (she laughs as she thinks back). And then you know, sometimes, they’d listen and they’d kind of be more engaged. And I kept trying and trying and trying. And then I did ‘that’ voice and they couldn’t stop laughing. And so I kept doing it more, and more, and more, and more, and more. They still make me do it. I had to do it the other night for bedtime. And for the look and everything, I would kind of run it by them, and if it made them happy, or made them smile, or they were interested in it, you know, then it was right.”
Why Angelina Jolie cast her daughter in ‘Maleficent’ even though she doesn’t want her kids to be actors
Although the film industry has been very good to Jolie, it’s not the kind of business that she wants her kids pursuing. And according to her, her ex-husband Pitt felt the exact same way.
“That’s not the goal for Brad and me at all,” Jolie once told Entertainment Weekly. “ I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.”
Because of this, Jolie might not have hired Vivienne for Maleficent if she didn’t have to. The Disney film tested several other kids for the role, but all of them were too scared of Jolie’s Maleficent disguise.
“She was 4 at the time, and other 3- and 4-year-old [actors] really wouldn’t come near me. Big kids thought I was cool—but little kids really didn’t like me,” she said. “So in order to have a child that wants to play with [Maleficent]…it had to be a child that really liked me and wasn’t afraid of my horns and my eyes and my claws. So it had to be Viv.”
