‘Cyborg 2’: The movie Angelina Jolie was emancipated in order to star in
There’s a lot to be said about people striking out on their own from a young age, but when Angelina Jolie decided she wanted to follow into the family business and dip her toes into acting, things ended up being pushed through the courts so that she wasn’t subjected to such trivial obstacles as industry-wide restrictions on how hard teenagers can be worked.
After making her feature film debut in 1982’s Lookin’ to Get Out – which starred her father, Jon Voight, in the lead role – it would be another decade before Jolie returned to the world of cinema. When she did, it came in the standalone bargain basement sequel to a terrible Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
Playing the female lead and the titular machine in Cyborg 2, Jolie’s Cash Reese is a secret agent and assassin for a secretive corporation. Programmed to self-destruct at a specific time, she ends up teaming up with her mentor and a fellow cyborg to try and outrun the hands of fate. The end product is of the quality you’d expect from such a routine plot, especially one where there was hardly a great budget to speak of.
Co-writer and director Michael Schroeder was determined that Jolie would be one of the key players, even if there were obstacles provided by Hollywood’s labour laws. The actor was only 17 when she was cast, which meant that legally there were rules to follow on how many hours she could be on set without impacting her life away from the cameras.
Seeing as the industry has never been one to allow the law to get in the way, Schroeder devised a solution to his predicament by placing a call to Voight. Upon discovering her age, the filmmaker knew “we can’t mess around with labour laws and welfare workers and school teachers.” Jolie had just finished high school at the time, but as she was still a minor in the eyes of the relevant legislation, she was forbidden from spending all day every day on set.
However, after discovering she was a second-generation star in the making, Schroeder reached out to Voight to see if emancipation was a realistic option. Much to his delight, it was. “He knew a judge and made some calls, and we got her emancipated because she had been living on her own for a while,” he said. “She just needed to file and get a judge to agree to it so then we could just work, and we didn’t have to give her special treatment.”
By ‘special treatment’, what Schroeder really means is ‘obey the letter of the law’. With that in mind, it becomes all the more concerning to know that even though she was only 17 and had officially struck out on her own as a legal adult, once the emancipation paperwork had been signed, Cyborg 2 saw Jolie shoot a nude scene. That may not have been the specific reason why the documentation was hurriedly assembled, signed, sealed, and delivered, but the questionable optics are there nonetheless.
