Angelina Jolie has done a variety of film genres including action, which she considered therapy, and drama. But a comedy was one genre that the actor was seldom seen in. This was mostly because Jolie naturally gravitated towards darker, more serious features.
Angelina Jolie once shared what was bringing the comedy out of her
Jolie isn’t a complete stranger to comedy. She’s done a few movies that have a considerable amount of humor in them. Additionally, she also starred in Will Smith’s animated picture Shark Tale, which also leaned heavily into comedy. But she’s seldom done a pure, lighthearted movie whose sole purpose was to make its viewers laugh. The closest she came to a romcom was the movie Life Or Something Like It. There, Jolie played a reporter who was told when she’d die, so even that film had a dark undertone to it. In a 2005 interview with NBC News, Jolie explained why she’d avoided comedies for so long.
“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, you know? And I would love to think I had more of that,” she said.
But Jolie became more open to dipping her toe in the genre. Especially after becoming a mom for the first time.
“Well, I think having a kid, you know what I mean, he’s really made me funny. So I guess he fixed that for me,” she said.
Jolie still hasn’t tried her hand at a comedy film to this day, but she recently revealed she’s still entertaining the possibility. In an interview with Deadline (via Backstage), Jolie went into a little more detail about why she found comedy films so daunting.
“There’s a responsibility to the audience,” she said. “There’s a part of me as an artist, of course, that wants to explore every different type of storytelling medium for myself. But I’m also very conscious of where I seem to connect and where maybe somebody else would be better. For comedy, I’m not sure I could entertain an audience and make them laugh and be what they need me to be. It’s [about] the exchange—it’s less about what I want to do and more [about] where an audience feels you’re effective.”
Angelina Jolie considered this movie kind of like a rom-com
There was one surprising feature that Jolie felt had a lot of rom-com elements to it. She was cast as the star in Maleficent, which made her the highest paid female actor at one point. Jolie felt that playing the iconic character gave her a taste of what doing a romcom could be like.
“I think Maleficent was the closest I got, I thought she was in love with Diaval,” she said. “I thought it was a bit of a rom-com; I may have been on my own there,” she once told E! News.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith also helped Jolie tap into what hidden comedic gifts she might have. Although Jolie asserted that she wasn’t all that confident in her comedic timing in the film.
“I was really uncomfortable and I was really unsure of myself, because I’ve never really done one. But everybody on this panel made me feel comfortable. I got scared,” she once told IGN.
