Angelina Jolie Thought About How She Wanted to Kill Billy Bob Thornton When Filming ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’
Angelina Jolie drew from a few real-life experiences to film Mr. and Mrs. Smith alongside Brad Pitt. Her performance was helped by channeling her genuine feelings toward her ex-husbands.
Why Angelina Jolie had some trepidation about doing ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’
Mr. and Mrs. Smith paired Jolie and Pitt together in an action comedy about two assassins unknowingly married to each other. The film was a return to familiar territory for Jolie in some aspects. At that point, the actor, along with Pitt, was accustomed to starring in action-driven projects like Tomb Raider.
But the project also marked a departure in that it focused heavily on comedy. Comedy was a genre Jolie wasn’t too used to doing and wasn’t even sure that she could do.
“I mean, I guess we’re just — for a long time, I was always much more comfortable in darker roles, in pain or quieter person and it takes a lot for me to feel that I have something to contribute in a light way, but I wouldn’t assume, yeah, I’m that fun friend that everybody feels at ease with,” she once said in an interview with NBC News.
It was also her co-star in Pitt that would help Jolie find her more humorous side.
“He is very funny which helped me be funny. He got me from being too serious and he would just make me laugh so he helped a lot,” she added.
Angelina Jolie thought about times she wanted to kill her ex-husbands when shooting ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, despite being a comedy, offered a lot of commentary on the challenges of marriage. Jolie managed to pick up valuable lessons from this commentary, which hit close to home given her own personal history.
“I think for everybody, especially for every woman, we’ve had a moment where you’re lying bed and you’re thinking about the person next to you, and ‘you have no idea who I am,'” she said.
In Jolie’s own previous marriages to Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller, Jolie felt something was missing, which was reflected by one of the movie’s themes.
“And what that something is that we didn’t have the same value for how we wanted to live our lives, what we wanted to do with our lives. If we wanted to be of use to others, in what ways? And that at the end of the day, as much as you can have fun with them, you can have great sex with somebody, you can have all that stuff, if you don’t wake up with a common purpose, then it’s not going to work. So, this film, I guess, also came at a time where I’ve been analyzing what that is. And I know now what it would need to be in order to be married again,” she said.
Remembering her previous marriages to Thornton and Miller also helped her performance in the film. With her character attempting to murder Pitt’s, she couldn’t help picture her ex-husbands in Pitt’s place.
“For me, it was a lot of thinking about old relationships I had — marriages I had — and thinking, Oh, that’s the point where I wanted to kill that person,” she once said according to Entertainment Weekly.
Angelina Jolie considered doing a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ sequel with Brad Pitt
Jolie entertained the possible idea of creating a sequel to her 2005 hit film. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she made note that many have tried to get a sequel off the ground. But one of her first questions regarding q potential sequel was if she and Pitt had kids in the film.
“We’ve thought about that, but it becomes personal now that we actually have kids. And if we work on it, we pull from our own life, which is funny to us, but you feel strange sharing too much,” she said.
Ultimately, Jolie felt the pitch for a Mr. and Mrs. Smith sequel didn’t meet her standards.
“We did ask somebody to look into Mr. & Mrs. to see if they could crack a sequel, but there wasn’t anything original. It was just, ‘Well, they’re going to get married, or they’ve got kids, or they get separated.’ Never great,” she added.
