Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (19 page)

Enough about them, Angie’s fragile ego protested, what about
me
? It was only days after she had said “I do” that she was having second and third thoughts. As a family friend notes: “She was wild, impetuous, and adventurous. At that time in her life she didn’t see marriage as lasting forever; she saw it as an adventure.” In other ways, marriage was a sanctuary, a haven of independence from her mother. With no Bill Day on the scene, Marcheline’s total attention was on her daughter. They spoke every day on the phone, her mother learning all Angie’s secrets. It was as claustrophobic as it was affirming. Her husband, though he didn’t know it, was a buffer of sorts, a lightning rod and a useful way to get out of things Marcheline wanted but Angie didn’t. Soon, though, it was clear to Angie that what she wanted to get out of was the marriage.

On what was effectively their honeymoon—a European junket in May to promote
Hackers—
she realized that all the media questions concerned her father and her husband. No one seemed interested in her. It became so irritating that she said on Spanish TV that she was not even related to Jon Voight. “It was weird to immediately be married and then you kind of lose your identity,” she told
The New York Times
with a wide-eyed wonder that was as naïve as it was instructive. “You’re suddenly somebody’s wife and you are like: ‘Oh, I’m half a couple now. I’ve lost me.’ ”

A morning TV show where the happy couple were showered with rice and given a toaster as a wedding present was a turning point. “I need to get myself back,” she thought. Whoever that was—she herself admitted that she spent so much time living the lives of her movie characters that she didn’t have “much of a personal life” of her own.

What was intriguing was that in a matter of weeks, her private and very intimate civil ceremony was the most talked-about wedding of the year. She told journalists that she had had a large cross tattooed on her stomach the day before the wedding as a tribute to her beloved. It covered a little dragon with a blue tongue that she had had done in Amsterdam during a riotous trip that involved games on a water bed. “No longer appropriate,” she explained.

She revealed, too, that their union hadn’t been a big white wedding but “a small black wedding.” As intimate as it was, she made sure the world knew all about it, telling the media that the groom wore black leather, while she wore black rubber trousers and a white shirt with his name written on the back in blood carefully extracted from her body with a clean surgical needle. “It’s your husband; you’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special,” she explained, her own love of ritual overlaying the existing marriage rites. Not so much the blushing bride as the bloody bride, especially as the groom had a long name. Fourteen letters, to be precise. A lot of blood, but more ink spilled all over the celebrity magazines as the media became increasingly intrigued by this bizarre and highly photogenic actress. Sexy
and
dark; it was an explosive media combination.

While Angie ruminated on what she had gotten herself into, it was Jonny’s mother, Anne, who inadvertently put a spoke in their romantic wheel. She worked in the production department at the BBC in London and had been contacted by her friend Johanna Ray, a casting agent and the ex-wife of tough-guy actor Aldo Ray, about the latest movie she was casting,
Playing God
. The surreal tale of drugs, gangsters, and a good doctor gone bad was the breakout movie for
X-Files
star David Duchovny. The actor had such an influence over the $24 million production that he even chose the director, former circus impresario Andy Wilson, because he liked his work on the British cop series
Cracker.

Even before the filming of
Playing God,
scheduled for August 1996, began, the production was a mess. There were almighty arguments about the script, originally by Mark Haskell Smith but rewritten by Larry Gross, and deemed by Andy Wilson to be “unfilmable.” Not only was the script unfinished, but the editorial team was having hell’s own job finding a leading lady. After talking with Anne Miller, Johanna Ray watched
Hackers
and liked what she saw of Angelina Jolie. When she discussed her name with
the
Playing God
producers, however, they were against even calling her in for an audition.

They originally wanted the gangster’s moll, Claire, to be a big name and a blonde, penciling in Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, and
Species
star Natasha Henstridge for the part. By contrast, Andy Wilson, directing his first Hollywood feature, saw the bloody thriller as a “weird, slightly surreal” homage to maverick director Nicolas Roeg, who made the iconic movies
Performance, Walkabout,
and
Don’t Look Now.
He felt the lover of the ruthless crook played by Timothy Hutton should be dark-haired, with an enigmatic European quality. Dutch actress Famke Janssen, star of
GoldenEye;
Jennifer Tilly, from
Bound;
and actors from
Twin Peaks
all auditioned, but no one was deemed suitable. As Andy Wilson explained, “Casting is 90 percent of the filmmaking. It is being an alchemist, working out if the actors fit together. A director is like a sorcerer. Anyone can make a film. It’s all in the prep; that’s where you exhaust yourself.”

Unfortunately, these sorcerers could not find a female apprentice who would have the right chemistry with David Duchovny, who played a blacklisted doctor with a drug problem, and the devilish hoodlum, Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton. Angie Jolie was literally the last actor to come in for casting. Such was the frantic nature of their search that Wilson used a handheld camera to film Angie in his office as Duchovny watched from the side. “She came in and hardly looked at any of us,” recalls Wilson. “She read for a scene around a bonfire in the desert and she was electrifying. She had a great understanding of what she was doing.” Both he and David Duchovny knew this was the girl for them, but the producers had other ideas, continuing to insist on a blonde “name” to help carry the movie. After increasingly acrimonious discussions, the director and his leading man finally won out, and Angie found herself being fitted for costumes—clothes by designers like Dolce and Gabbana, Richard Tyler, and Mark Wong Nark—mere days before preproduction began. It was quite a transformation from her personal wardrobe of leather pants and tank tops. “Angelina had to look like an expensive sports car—sleek and streamlined,” said costume designer Mary Zophres.

During filming, coproducer Melanie Greene said graciously of the female lead: “She has the wisdom of an old soul . . . the grace and style of an older woman. You want to peel away the layers when you meet her.”

The casting of Angelina was such a coup for her ambitious young agent, Geyer Kosinski, that even though he had broken bones in a boating accident in late May, he rose Lazarus-like from his sickbed to call
Variety,
the Hollywood trade journal, and personally confirm their story that Angie was the female lead for
Playing God
. In doing so he ensured that he, not Marcheline, was linked with the up-and-coming young actress.

At long last David Duchovny had got the girl. Or rather, he thought he had got the girl. His rival Timothy Hutton had other ideas. It greatly amused the director and other members of the cast and crew to see Hutton and Duchovny, two legendary Hollywood swordsmen, vying for the attention of a woman fifteen years younger than either of them. That Hutton was reportedly dating Uma Thurman, and Duchovny, who years later entered a rehab center to confront his sex addiction, was seeing actress Téa Leoni did not seem to matter as the duo dueled for the affections of the “newly married but still dating” Mrs. Miller.

As for the director, he was thrilled with the offscreen shenanigans. “Angie was only twenty-one but as sexy as all hell. She enjoyed the company of all the guys,” recalls Andy Wilson. “During the preproduction and filming she was splitting up with Jonny, and for some reason it gave her great energy, which was fabulous for the movie. Then Tim and Angie started their affair on set. Tim was
besotted
with her,
besotted
. Actually, David was rather jealous.”

There were many consolations for the dejected star. When filming began in August, virtually every day carloads and sometimes coachloads of young girls, all
X-Files
fans, would appear at the location, some even throwing their panties at Duchovny. As Hutton and Angie made merry, Duchovny, according to Andy Wilson, began an affair with a crew member.

Although Hutton pursued and won the girl in real life, Duchovny, in Wilson’s view, enjoyed one of two of the “sexiest sex scenes never seen by a cinema audience.” Filmed by Anthony Richmond, whose bedroom scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Roeg’s
Don’t Look Now
is widely credited as the most erotic sex scene in cinema history, Duchovny made love to a naked Angie as music from Massive Attack played in the background.

In the end, Disney and Touchstone, who were funding the movie, axed the scene, arguing that it was too erotic and romantic and detracted from
the gangster plotline. By contrast, an equally sexy scene shot between Hutton and Angie in the back of his Jaguar as fellow gangster Gary Dourdan looked on was deemed by the producers to be too much of a celebration of the criminal classes. For the public, who will never see the uncut version, Wilson attests that the scenes were “fucking horny.”

As for Angie’s husband, cuckolded after four months of marriage, Jonny Lee Miller spent his days mooning about the Hollywood home of Roger Taylor, from the rock band Queen, which the actor was renting for the duration of his now-estranged wife’s shoot. During what Andy Wilson described as Miller’s “cry fest,” he would pour his heart out to English actor Andy Tiernan, who played one of Hutton’s heavies and, like Miller, had cut his teeth on the TV crime drama
Prime Suspect
. Kept apart from his wife, Miller would ask Tiernan how Angie was coping on set, using his friend as a shoulder to cry on. As Andy Wilson saw it, Angie and Miller “were just too young to marry.” He recalled: “I had to treat all actors equally, so I tried not to get too involved in what was going on.”

Eventually Jonny did the decent thing—and went off with another woman. Or two other women, to be precise, if only on the screen. He flew to Montreal, where, thanks to the recommendation of Keith Carradine, he had been cast in
Afterglow,
a four-handed romantic comedy directed by Alan Rudolph. He played a buttoned-up young executive who does not want to have children with his sexy wife, Lara Flynn Boyle. When she has an affair with a local handyman, he enjoys a fling with the handyman’s wife, played by Julie Christie, in her heyday one of the world’s most desirable women. Doubtless the irony of the situation was not lost on Miller.

While her husband might not have wanted to hear it, Mrs. Miller was coping remarkably well on set, coolly and calmly embracing an unusual filming process. With the director deeming the script “garbage,” Angie and her fellow actors would spend much of each day improvising their dialogue before the cameras rolled. It was a test of character and ability, and, according to Wilson, she “pitched in like a rock-and-roll star.”

As Angie became more and more comfortable with improvisation, Wilson could sense that “an extraordinary actress” was emerging from the creative chrysalis. “When you film people, you don’t film technique or talent, you film the eyes,” he says. “What is going on in there will be captured by the camera. With Angie there was an enormous amount going on. She
knew about needles and tattoos and heroin and she had an innate wild sexuality. That is what the camera captured. It filmed her courage and her chutzpah. As with all great actors, you never focus on technique, you film their spirit.”

Taking a page from her mother’s book, she was the only member of the cast who bought the director a gift when filming ended. “It was perfectly chosen and very touching,” he says. Indeed, at the end of every film Angie was punctilious about buying presents for cast and crew. She was aware that the big-name actors who earned the most were invariably given the most handsome and lavish gifts, so she ensured that no one was left out.

Work was now flowing for Angie, who flew from Los Angeles to central Texas to immerse herself in
True Women,
a sweeping historical saga spanning five decades, from the Texas Revolution through the Civil War. For once she kept her clothes on, which was just as well, as the TV movie, filmed on location in October and November, attracted the attention of a former and a future First Lady and a future president. The then governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura, as well as Lady Bird Johnson, were among the spectators watching the reenactment of the stormy scenes surrounding the Reconstruction Convention of 1868. They looked on as Angie’s character, Georgie Lawshe Woods, a spoiled and self-centered Southern belle who goes through a humbling epiphany when she discovers that she is part Cherokee Indian, delivered a retort to the body of male politicians who rejected the idea of female suffrage.

It was a powerful moment in a vivid, if overly earnest, historical drama that attempted to capture the hardships and triumphs of three women in one extended family whose lives were evoked by their descendant Janice Woods Windle in her best-selling 1994 novel. As director Karen Arthur, who corralled a largely female cast, observed: “Growing up in our country we never find out about the women, the normal women. These women are heroes to everybody whose lives touch theirs, but they were unsung.”

To prepare for their roles, the three leads, Angelina, Annabeth Gish, and Dana Delany, visited many of the real locations, met with their characters’ descendants, and communed with their spirits in Texas graveyards. During filming the author was on hand every day to answer questions about their characters. Dana Delany, who was the first of the trio to sign up
for the movie, said of her character, frontierswoman Sarah Ashby McClure: “I thought of Sarah doing everything that John Wayne does, but she did it pregnant.” It was a test of a different kind for Angie, whose performance easily measured up against those of her more experienced costars. When the movie was screened the following May, Angie was praised for making her character the most interesting, if least noble, of the three.