Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have allowed their kids to make cameos in their movies, but the celeb parents are hoping they won’t catch the acting bug! In a new interview the celebrity mom of six (Maddox, Pax, Vivienne, Shiloh, Knox and Zahara) talks movies, scaring her kids and more!
On allowing the kids to have small movie roles in their films, she says it’s just for fun. Shiloh had a small part in “Tree of Life” with Brad, while Vivienne, Pax and Zahara make appearances in Maleficent. “We think it’s fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That’s not our goal for Brad and I at all. I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.”
On casting Vivienne as a young Aurora in Maleficent: “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. 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.”
Angelina’s brother James encouraged her to try for the role of Maleficent: “She was just my favorite as a little girl. I was terrified of her, but I was really drawn to her. I loved her. There were some discussions about it before I got the part, and I got a phone call from my brother, who said, ‘You’ve got to get your name on the list for this.’”
Her kids were terrified of the costume: “When Pax saw me for the first time, he ran away and got upset — and I thought he was kidding, so I was pretending to chase him until I actually found him crying. I had to take off pieces [of the makeup] in front of him to show him it was all fake and not freak out so much.”
Angelina explained Maleficent’s back story in effort to get her kids to sympathize with her: “I said, ‘Let me tell you the real story but you can’t tell anybody’. So this was my test too, like any parent. The next day, I heard Shiloh getting into a fight with another kid, defending Maleficent, saying, ‘You don’t understand her!’ They got into a bit of an argument and I thought, that’s the reason to do the film. When that character makes mistakes — which Maleficent does, and crosses many lines — you want them to be angry at her and concerned and confused and in the end, somehow understand something that they didn’t know before.”
On Pax & Zahara’s cameo: “I had to walk by them being very mean. Of course, I wanted to stop and wink at them.”
Angelina acknowledges that she’s very serious in public, but at home it’s another story. “We laugh and we play, and I’m light again, and I’m a kid again, and I’m loving and soft again because they’ve brought that back in my life.”
Photo by: Jeff Vespa/WireImage
