Billy Bob Thornton says some of the more wild and eccentric tales from his three-year marriage to Angelina Jolie are blown out of proportion.
“A lot of the things they said about us at the time were exaggerated,” he said on the HFPA in Conversation podcast (via People), adding, “It wasn’t as crazy as people wrote about it.”
For example, the necklaces the couple wore with vials of each other’s blood weren’t as strange a gesture as it was made out to be, according to the 62-year-old “Goliath” star.
“The necklaces were a very simple thing, ‘Hey, let’s poke our fingers with a pen and smear a little blood on there and when we’re away from each other, we’ll wear the necklace,’” he said. “It 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.”
Thornton and Jolie, 43, married in 2000 shortly after meeting on the set of “Pushing Tin” (while Thornton was engaged to Laura Dern). The marriage would only last until 2003, when the couple broke up months after adopting a child from Cambodia. It was later revealed that Jolie had adopted the child as a single parent.
The actor, who says he “never felt good enough” for Jolie, said there’s one big reason the marriage didn’t last: He wanted to be a hermit while she wanted to be the kind of star who rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful.
“We just had different lifestyles. Hers is a global lifestyle and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle,” he joked. “So that’s really, that’s the only reason we’re probably not still together, maybe. There was a different path in life we wanted to take.”
While the marriage might just look like a blip on Jolie’s romantic timeline, she was actually married to Thornton about as long as she was married to Brad Pitt. While the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” stars were together for 12 years, they were only married for two and separated in 2016.
Thornton swore off marriage after divorcing Jolie, but married Connie Angland in 2014, after 11 years of dating.