Angelina Jolie is used to having her words twisted around by magazines — even when those magazine are as esteemed as Vanity Fair. The magazine’s latest issue features the iconic actress with the headline “Farewell, Angelina?” But she insists she isn’t going anywhere.
“I’m not retiring. Everybody seems very excited about that, but not at this time,” she tells Metro. “Basically I said something as simple as, ‘In the years to come I’ll be doing less film, I’m sure, and there are many other things to do in life.’”
Far from retiring, Jolie hits movie theatres next week with Salt, her first major action role since Wanted and Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who is accused of being a Russian spy. The Oscar-winning actress is the first to admit getting back into the stunt-heavy world took some adjustment — not that she had much time for it.
“It had been so long since I’d worked. I’d had babies, and it was just actually getting my boots back on and punching again,” she says. “So we really crammed it in pretty fast. It was a lot of learning while doing.”
Salt was originally about a male CIA agent — and set to star Tom Cruise — before Jolie came on board. In fact, the gender hadn’t changed yet when she got the script.
“I got a call and they said, ‘We’ve got a movie for you, and your name is Edwin and you have a wife.’ I thought, ‘Very cool,’” Jolie remembers. But a part of Salt’s old gender remains, as in one scene Jolie has to don a disguise as a male military officer, something she found fascinating — if time-consuming.
“It was probably something like four hours, five hours. It was long,” she says of the transformation process. “You do everything, you tape your breasts down, we had to put sweatpants on, all these things underneath to try to make me bulk up.”
