Billy Bob Thornton has fond memories of his eccentric three-year marriage to Angelina Jolie.
“I look at that time as a great time ‘cause, you know, Angie is still a friend of mine and she’s a great person,” the Oscar winner, 62, said on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s HFPA In Conversation podcast on Wednesday, June 13. “The movies she makes are still things that are important to her … and whether they succeed or fail, she still does what she believes in, and I’ll always respect her for that.”
Jolie, 43, was Thornton’s fifth wife. They were married from 2000 to 2003. He is now wed to Connie Angland. The Maleficent actress went on to date Brad Pitt, whom she married in 2014 and separated from in 2016.
The Sling Blade actor said on Wednesday that he believes he and Jolie didn’t work out because they “just had different lifestyles.” He continued, “Hers is a global lifestyle and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle. So, that’s really … the only reason we’re probably still not together, you know, ‘cause [it was] just a different path and life we wanted to take.”
Thornton said “a lot” of the news surrounding his romance with the Girl, Interrupted actress “was exaggerated” and not “as crazy as people wrote about it” — specifically the infamous necklaces they wore containing each other’s blood.
“The necklaces were a very simple thing,” he explained. “‘Hey, let’s poke our finger with a pin and smear a little on there, and when we’re away from each other, we’ll wear the necklace.’ That was that easy, but by the time it came out in the press, it sounded like we were wearing a bucket of blood around our necks.”
Jolie has brushed off the headline-making attention on the necklaces, too. “It was never a vial anyway,” she clarified to Entertainment Weekly in 2008. “It was like a flower press. It was like from a slight cut on your finger and you press your fingerprint in. It was kind of a sweet gesture. I thought it was kind of romantic! I still love him dearly and think the world of him, and I’m proud to have been his wife for a time.”
