Angelina Jolie may be best known for her high-profile relationship with Brad Pitt, but that wasn’t her only marriage that made it to the headlines.
Before she started dating Pitt, Jolie was married to Oscar-nominated actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was not only madly in love with her but also a little “afraid” of her.
Billy Bob Thornton was Angelina Jolie’s second husband
Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton met on the set of the 1999 movie Pushing Tin and fell in love. This was only two years after Jolie split up with her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller.
They hit it off right away and got married in Las Vegas the next year.
Even though Big Little Lies star Laura Dern, who was engaged to Thornton at the time, was surprised by their marriage, what really shocked the public was what happened at their wedding.
Not only did Jolie wear baggy jeans, a simple tank top, and boots, but she and Thornton also wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks while exchanging vows. This was widely talked about in the media.
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton’s relationship was chaotic.
Even though their wedding made them different from most husbands and wives, nothing else about Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton’s marriage followed the rules.
The couple was 20 years apart in age, it was a shotgun wedding and they often swapped underwear. They also gave each other their grave plots as gifts.
Even though she and Thornton’s marriage was unique, Jolie defended it by telling the New York Times that she and the actor from “Armageddon” were just like any other couple in love.
People think they know a lot about our relationship,
Jolie said.
They know very little. What little they know, they’ve got pretty strong opinions about. I can’t help that. But I don’t think there’s anything weird about us… I’m just a very normal woman who is crazy about her man. And I’m also a lot of other things.
Even though it’s fine for a person to care deeply about their partner, Billy Bob Thornton later told the Salt actor that he was once afraid of her because of how much she loved him.
He says, though, that he eventually got over that fear.
It’s one of the things I like about this marriage,
he told The Guardian in 2001.
I was always afraid in relationships before, but I’m not afraid of her. Well, I am afraid of her, I told her that once. First I told her I wasn’t afraid of her, and then 20 minutes later I told her the opposite, that I was afraid of her.
Billy Bob Thornton “never felt good enough” for Angelina Jolie.
After only two years of marriage, Jolie and Thornton split up in August 2002, the same month that Jolie gave birth to her first child, a son named Maddox. They split up the following year.
But even though they went their separate ways, Jolie and Thornton still had a lot of respect for each other.
He’s a really good man,
she told Vanity Fair in 2005.
He’s hysterical—we had a lot of laughs. … What went wrong, or not even wrong, but what wasn’t meant to be as he was focusing on his music and I was upstairs reading. I went through a change in my life and started paying more attention to the news and learning about other countries and becoming more politically active.
Thornton has said that Jolie “is still a friend of mine” and that “she’s a great person.”
But in 2016, he told GQ that he “never felt good enough for [Jolie],” which seemed to be another reason why he and Jolie broke up.
But even though Jolie and Thornton were only together for a short time, their romance kept Hollywood on its toes.
