How Angelina Jolie’s worst audition led to her first-ever award: “He didn’t even care about me as an individual”
Job interviews are one thing, but having to quite literally perform for another person in an audition must be nerve-wracking, and while Angelina Jolie has clearly had her fair share of successful ones, she has also admitted to a specific audition that started out as an absolute disaster, only for it to work out in her favour.
It all had to do with the mention of her father, Jon Voight, the Midnight Cowboy star with whom Jolie has long had a contentious relationship, and so, by definition, the actor is a nepo-baby, but it’s not like Voight has ever put in a good word for her. When she was starting out as a star, she attended auditions like everyone else, but when she tried out for a part directed by John Frankenheimer, she let her emotions get the better of her when the filmmaker asked about her dad.
You can see why she was pissed off; Jolie didn’t want to be defined by her father, especially considering that they were estranged for many years, yet her off-the-cuff reaction almost cost her a role that earned her the first award of her career, a Golden Globe, which soon taught her how to compose herself.
Before Jolie was known as the elegant humanitarian Hollywood icon, she experienced a troubled past involving addiction, self-harm, suicide attempts, and some unusual relationships (it’s not exactly common to wear your partner’s blood in a vial around your neck), and while she managed to find solace in acting, in the early days of her career, she certainly didn’t have her head screwed on as much as she does now.
Talking to Backstage, Jolie recalled letting her annoyance slip when she auditioned for the television film George Wallace, noting, “It was so bad, in fact, my manager had to calm both me and John Frankenheimer down. I read the character was sexy, so I went in and put on bright red lipstick and a black dress. It was a period piece, in the ’60s. Now, I don’t have big issues talking about my father, but I was trying to find myself.”
She continued, “I walked in, and I was nervous, and I did my reading, and the first thing John Frankenheimer said was, ‘So, Jon’s your father’. And my heart just sank, and I thought, ‘He didn’t pay attention to anything I just did’.”
Instead of going along with Frankenheimer, she hit back. “He said, ‘How’s he doing? What’s he up to these days?’ I don’t know what it was, but I just got somewhat rude in return. I said, ‘I really don’t know; why don’t you call him? I have to go’. And I got a call from Geyer [Kosinski], saying, ‘You stormed out, and you were dressed like a geisha girl!’ I said, ‘He was rude, and he didn’t pay attention to what I was saying. He didn’t even care about me as an individual’.”
Luckily, she didn’t let this completely destroy her chances of landing the role, as good sense prevailed. While she recalled how her agent asked her to return, to which pat came her response that she didn’t want to share any space with him, he calmed both director and actor down and simply asked Jolie to drop the red lipstick and pick up a “better attitude”. “Strangely enough, Frankenheimer and I ended up becoming best friends. We loved working together,” she claimed.
So, after all of that, Jolie actually got the part, and her Golden Globe win helped boost her position in Hollywood, marking the start of a very successful career for the actor, who then found further acclaim the following year with her role in the gritty biopic Gia.
