Brangelina (7 page)

Still, it was slow going at first. Her first break, if it can be called that, came when director Michael Schroeder offered the seventeen-year-old Angelina a screen test and then a lead role in his science fiction film
Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow.
This was the sequel to Albert Pyun’s 1989 hit,
Cyborg
, which launched Jean-Claude Van Damme to fame. Neither Pyun nor Van Damme signed on to the sequel, however, which perhaps destined it to failure from the start.

The script for
Cyborg 2
had the world divided between two giant computer companies, Pinwheel Robotics in America and Kobayashi in Japan, both of which engage in violent corporate espionage. Angelina plays the part of Casella “Cash” Reese, an android who has been injected with an explosive liquid that can be detonated by remote control. Her masters at Pinwheel Corporation plan to use her to destroy their rivals at Kobayashi and take over the world. Cash figures out what’s happening when she is tipped off by her martial-arts instructor and a mysterious stranger, played by Jack Palance, who has invaded the Pinwheel computer network. Cash saves the day at the end, giving Jolie her first taste of being an action hero, and foreshadowing her success as Lara Croft years later.

Just before the film was released, Jon Voight was acting in a theatrical production of Chekhov’s
The Seagull
in New York. He gave a TV interview in which he comes off as a proud papa, discussing both his children’s foray into show business. “My son Jamie is nineteen, and my daughter Angelina is seventeen,” he told CNN, “and Marche and I have done our very best to be the supportive parents that we have learned to be and labored to be. And now these two children are both going to be in my world, in the world of film and theater. Angie, my daughter Angelina, has just done a little film. She is so proud that I am on stage. Jamie has been writing. He doesn’t show me everything. He has only shown me three little pieces, one about a five minute piece, then a half- an-hour piece, then a two-hour movie script. But he says to me quietly, ‘you know, Dad, I’ve written eighty works.’”

When
Cyborg 2
was finally released in 1993, the critics were harsh, with one newspaper slamming it for “hammy acting and a mumbo- jumbo plot that prompts unintentional laughter.” It went straight to video obscurity and emerged only after Jolie achieved fame, probably because she had a topless scene in it.

Hollywood has always banked on its ability to anticipate coming trends, especially because the average film takes years to make, from conception to release. When the idea for
Hackers
was first floated, many people still didn’t own a computer and most had never even heard of the Internet. But by the time the script was finally commissioned, Nirvana had brought punk music into the mainstream, and computers were suddenly hot. What better way to combine these two trends than to produce a “cyberpunk thriller”? The concept must have looked good on paper because its producers had high hopes that the film would score big with critics and moviegoers as the first Internet-era blockbuster. They hired British director Iain Softley; he had won praise for his film
Backbeat
, which captured the Beatles’ early years while avoiding the clichés that so often plague such efforts. The producers felt his brand of distinctive originality was just what
Hackers
needed.

The script, set in New York, depicted a subculture of edgy high school hackers and their inadvertent involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. It follows a Seattle youth, Dade Murphy, who, as an eleven-year-old tech prodigy, was convicted of crashing more than a thousand computer systems in one day and causing a massive drop in the Dow Jones Average. Upon his conviction he was banned from owning or operating computers until his eighteenth birthday. When he turns eighteen, Dade takes up hacking again, at first simply causing mischief, such as tapping into a local TV station and changing the program it was broadcasting to an episode of
The Outer Limits
. After he enrolls in a new high school, he meets a beautiful girl named Kate Libby, whose own hacking skills rival his. Most of the film centers on a hacking duel between Dade and Kate, which eventually turns into a complicated tale about international corporate espionage and potential worldwide environmental disaster. The role of Kate was pivotal, and Softley was aware that the success of the film required just the right actress, especially because it was a film likely to appeal to a young male demographic. The director cast his net far and wide, auditioning, among others, Hilary Swank, Liv Tyler, and Heather Graham. None of them seemed to fit the bill. Then he was told that the daughter of Jon Voight had arrived to audition.

When she walked in, he later recalled, Angelina had long hair and was wearing glasses, perhaps believing that a computer hacker should look like a nerd. What she didn’t know was that Kate Libby’s alias was “Acid Burn” and that the character was a punk-rock cyber-rebel, the embodiment of teenage defiance. “I explained that she would have tattoos and piercings, and we would have to cut her hair,” he remembers. “Angelina said straight away that she would have her head shaved. That was what she was like—she threw herself into it completely.”

She got the part. It was her “compelling quality” that the director recognized immediately. “That thing that makes you interested in them for who they are, apart from their acting,” he says. “Johnny Depp has it, and Angelina has it, too. When you have a distinctive presence like hers, it will always be a very potent ingredient. People like Angelina tend to select themselves. She just had this inner self-confidence in a very understated way. She was focused, daring, bold, and brave.”

Similarly, Softley chose for the role of Dade an unknown named Jonny Lee Miller, whose previous experience had been confined to bit roles in British detective shows and soap operas, including a stint in the gritty cockney soap,
Eastenders
. Miller, however, came from a long family tradition of British actors. His grandfather, Bernard Lee, was best known for playing the role of M in the early James Bond movies.

Although Angelina eventually got together with Miller, it was not love at first sight. She confided to a makeup artist named Kelly that she assumed the soft-spoken Miller was gay when she found out that he had been part of a musical-theater company in London; she assumed that virtually all males in musical theater were “into other men.”

Yet Angelina has implied to the press that their romance actually blossomed on set. “We met while filming
Hackers
, and I always fall in love while I’m working on a film,” she told the British newspaper
Daily Express
. “It’s such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It’s like discovering you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deep. Then you slip back out of it like a snakeskin, and you are cold and alone.”

“To tell the truth,” the makeup artist Kelly now says, “they were not a couple when we were shooting
Hackers
, and Angelina seemed to assume he was gay all the way through. They spent a lot of time together, so who knew what went on in their trailer, but I’m fairly sure that they didn’t hook up until much later on.” Indeed, Miller confided that he “chased Angelina all over North America until she succumbed. It took a while—a good few thousand miles.”

After
Hackers
wrapped, Angelina took a part in an independent film, a gritty, low-budget crime drama called
Without Evidence
. The plot was based on the true story of the 1989 murder of the head of Oregon’s prison system, Michael Francke, who was alleged to have been the victim of a political conspiracy. Angelina played a low-life drug addict in a little- seen performance that nonetheless offered an early glimpse of her true acting talent. Although the film never got a distribution deal, those who saw it were astonished by her performance.
Variety
later described her acting as “heartbreakingly touching.”

Playing the part of a young drug addict, however, may not have been much of a stretch for Angelina during that period. According to those who knew the nineteen-year-old, she was strung out much of the time. “Ace,” a drug dealer in Venice Beach, California, claims to have been Angelina’s regular supplier whenever she was in town. “She’d call me up, and we’d meet on the Santa Monica pier, and I’d give her whatever she needed,” he says. “I forget exactly what she bought, but she was into all kinds of shit in those days. Sometimes she’d call me, and she’d be incoherent. I didn’t sell smack—too risky—so I don’t know if she ever shot up.”

Angelina later claimed that heroin was in fact one of her drugs of choice, though she never publicly revealed many of the details of her drug addiction. Last year, the British newspaper
The Sun
published images of Angelina from a video taken in a drug den sometime in the 1990s, in which a woman beside her is doing heroin. Jolie, looking disheveled and smoking a cigarette, announces to the camera, “I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything. I hate heroin because I’ve been fascinated with it. I’m not immune, but I won’t do it now, at all.” Tabloids also reported that a man was shopping around another video, at a price of $70,000, which purported to show Angelina sniffing lines of heroin from a plate and sucking up smoke through a tube as the drug cooks on tinfoil.

When
Hackers
was finally released in September 1995, the reaction was decidedly mixed. Although distinguished as Angelina’s major film debut, it is generally considered something of a box-office flop. It got many facts about computer culture wrong, which drew online attacks from nerds and technology buffs. The
Miami Herald
described the film as “flashy but unfulfilling” and elaborated, “In the end,
Hackers
fails as a thriller. It’s hard to get excited watching people pound on keyboards, and despite Softley’s creative efforts to visually represent activities that are by nature invisible, the movie never really grips you.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
called it a “shamelessly lousy movie” while the
New York Daily News
complained that the movie “gets lost in cyberspace.”

At the same time, however, some of America’s most influential critics were impressed, especially by the performances of Miller and Jolie. “The movie is well directed, written, and acted, and while it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie … Jolie, the daughter of Jon Voight, and Miller, a British newcomer, bring a particular quality to their performances that is convincing and engaging,” wrote Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun Times
.

Janet Maslin, film critic for the
New York Times
, was drawn to Angelina’s performance as Kate. “Kate (Angelina Jolie) stands out. That’s because she scowls even more sourly than Dade and is that rare female hacker who sits intently at her keyboard in a see-through top. Despite her sullen posturing, which is all this role requires, Ms. Jolie has the sweetly cherubic looks of her father, Jon Voight.”

Voight himself was certainly impressed by his daughter’s performance, telling an interviewer, “I hope she becomes a major star so she can look after me in my dotage. Of all my accomplishments, I am most proud of being Angelina’s father.”

Hollywood was starting to take notice of a fresh, new talent.

The first hints of a serious relationship appeared while Jolie and Miller were promoting
Hackers
together in the U.K., in early 1996. Miller offered the cryptic clue to a British reporter that he was “involved with an American girl who lives in L.A.” Then Jolie made an appearance with a small gold band on her wedding finger. Eventually, during an interview with
Empire
magazine that spring, Jolie slipped her betrothal into the conversation. “We got married two weeks ago,” she announced, “and no, we didn’t have a big white wedding. We had a small black wedding.” The
Empire
reporter noted that the announcement was made as “casually as one might request an extra sugar in their coffee.”

The two had eloped on the spur of the moment on March 28, with only Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, and Miller’s best friend, the still-unknown Jude Law, present to act as witnesses at the small civil ceremony.

When Jolie gave the wedding details to the press, it was the first time most people had heard of her. She certainly left a strong first impression: Miller wore black leather, she revealed, while the bride sported black rubber pants and a white shirt with the groom’s name written across the back in her own blood. Asked about this dramatic flourish, she answered: “It’s your husband. You’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special. I consider it poetic. Some people write poetry, others give themselves a little cut.” She herself drew the blood “very carefully,” she explained to the
New York Times
, “with a clean surgical needle.”

Miller was quick to reassure his fans that he hadn’t gone half mad. “It wasn’t as gruesome as it sounds,” he explained. “I think they imagine some kind of Satanic ceremony. It wasn’t like that.” Angelina was equally nonchalant about it. “It was no more shocking than promising your life to someone,” she later explained.

Because they eloped, Miller had not yet met Jolie’s father and was nervous about their first encounter. “It was a pretty weird experience, saying, ‘Hello, I’m your son-in-law,’ to Jon Voight. But Jon’s a nice man, and we all breathe the same air.”

Although
Hackers
was quickly forgotten, Miller was beginning to attract worldwide acclaim for the film he completed shortly afterwards,
Trainspotting
, which was released prior to
Hackers
in Europe.
Trainspotting
follows a group of working-class Edinburgh heroin addicts through their adolescence. Miller was proclaimed a rising star for his role as “Sick Boy,” a punk obsessed with Sean Connery.

Jolie would have to wait a while for this kind of pronouncement on her own work. She complained during the European junket for
Hackers
, almost a year after its American release, that people cared more about her father and husband than about her. “It was weird to immediately be married, and then you kind of lose your identity,” she lamented. “You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.’ We went on some morning show, and they threw rice on us and gave us toasters. I was thinking, ‘I need to get myself back.’”