By the Sea co-stars Angelina Jolie and hubby Brad Pitt talk about parenting, their kids and working together on a tough movie.
She might be a world-famous, Oscar-winning actor, director, producer, writer, but Angelina Jolie loves to get crazy and dorky with her kids and (even dorkier) hubby Brad Pitt.
In their new interview with WSJ Magazine, Brad insists Angelina is the best mom ever to their six kids—Maddox, 14, Pax, 11, Zahara, 10, Shiloh, 9, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 7—that she's creative, resourceful and tireless.
"When Angie has a day off, the first thing she does is get up and take the kids out," he explains. "This is the most important 'to do' of the day. No matter how tired she might be, she plans outings for each and all. She has an incredible knack for inventing crazy experiences for them, something new, something fresh. I may be the bigger goof of the pair, but she invents the stage."
Angelina adds: "We wake up, we make breakfast. In our domestic life, we're Mom and Dad. And often we're dorky Mom and dad, which the kids find ridiculous." Angelina dorky?
As you know from the op-eds she's written about her preventative double mastectomy and oophorectomy, one of Angelina's prime concerns as a parent is ensuring that her kids don't worry about her (as she worried about her mother)—and she underscores this in the WSJ interview.
"I want to make sure my kids are never worried about me," she says. "Even if I'm going through something, I make sure they are very aware that I'm totally fine. I'll stop and make a joke. I talk to them. I never, ever want them to have that secret worry and feel that they have to take care of me."
Angelina and Brad are co-stars for the first time in a decade, since Mr. and Mr. Smith, in the new movie By the Sea, which hits theatres next month. Angelina directed the movie and wrote the script—about a marriage in crisis—and admits it was a challenge for her and Brad to co-star given the subject matter.
“We just had to be brave and say, ‘OK, honey, we’re strong enough to do this; let’s somehow use this to make us stronger,'” she says.
Staying in character after hours was a definite risk, she admits, but the kids helped them shake it off. "That might have been an absolute disaster," she says. "But as soon as we got home, it was bedtime stories, children’s needs and problems, the fights they’d had during the day. We had to immediately snap back to something that was uniting and positive and loving.”
You can read the entire WSJ interview here!
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Haley Overland is a writer/editor at Today's Parent. Our resident celebrity queen, she dishes out all the sweetest scoop on celebrity families at our Celebrity Candy blog. She has interviewed celeb moms like Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Jillian Michaels, and has shared her expertise on CTV’s ETalk. Haley also has an award-winning personal blog, CheatyMonkey.com, where she writes about everything from motherhood to yoga, her dog “Betty White” and what it's like to be Clive Owen's girlfriend. Haley has two kids, whom she fondly refers to online as “The Monkey” and “The Rascal.”