Angelina Jolie’s high hopes for her first Razzie-nominated role: “In this movie, sex is not just sex”
While winning an Academy Award is the pinnacle for any actor and something they carry with them for the rest of their career, being an Oscar-winning performer doesn’t exclude anyone from being recognised at the opposite end of the scale, as Angelina Jolie swiftly discovered.
She’s gone 50/50 at the biggest ceremony in Hollywood, winning a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ gong for Girl, Interrupted on her first nomination, before coming up empty-handed in the ‘Best Actress’ category for Clint Eastwood’s Changeling.
On the other side of the coin, Jolie may not have a Razzie to her name, but she has been shortlisted four times, twice as many as she’s been recognised by the Oscars. That doesn’t make her a bad actor, although it’s probably worth remembering that Jared Leto also has an Oscar, but those back-to-back Razzies for House of Gucci and Morbius are more indicative of how he’s viewed by the cinemagoing public.
Showing how quickly the tables can turn, a mere 15 months after she’d taken to the stage and collected her shiny and validating prize, the worst-reviewed movie of her entire career was released. It wasn’t just the worst-reviewed at the time, though, because 25 years after its release, not a single one of her pictures has fared worse among critics than writer and director Michael Cristofer’s erotic thriller, Original Sin.
As was the fashion at the time, the tabloids were having an absolute field day, making unfounded accusations that Jolie was having an affair with her co-star, Antonio Banderas, who was married to Melanie Griffith at the time. Naturally, that pissed her off, but at least everyone forgot about the salacious scuttlebutt when the film was declared dead on arrival, barely making its money back from cinemas.
The story follows Jolie’s mail-order bride, Julia Russell, who catches the eye of Banderas’ Luis Antonio Vargas. Unbeknownst to him, she’s actually a con artist who plans to swindle her wealthy new husband out of his significant personal wealth, but a steamy spanner is thrown in the works when she begins to genuinely fall for him.
An early 2000s erotic thriller with Jolie in a leading role basically marketed itself, but despite turning out to be a steaming turd bereft of passion, excitement, or entertainment, she did have high hopes. “In this movie, sex is not just about sex,” she said at the time, pre-empting everything that everyone was going to say about it anyway.
“It’s also about discovery, freedom, possession, ownership, hate, anger, and love,” she continued. “The sexuality in Original Sin doesn’t just fill the story; it’s central to everything that happens to Luis and Julia.” A commendable attempt to sell the character-driven side of the equation, it’s just a shame that the few people who actually bothered to go and watch it in their local theatre thought it was crap.
So crap, in fact, that the Razzies couldn’t decide whether to nominate Jolie for Original Sin or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, so she was nominated for both.
