Angelina Jolie is back stronger than ever: how she has regained control of her public image after the controversial divorce of the century
The actress, director and activist hides after a busy schedule her return to her public image. Following her divorce, she regains control of her personal brand, if she ever lost it.
Years ago, Angelina Jolie (Los Angeles, 1975) shared a lunch with Jane Goodall, the primatologist famous for her work with chimpanzees. Jolie had long been involved in her humanitarian work, but each trip she made was more frustrating than the last, and in that encounter, she confessed to Goodall her pessimism. She “knocked on the table and said:“
There is always hope ”. You do not have the right to quit, because you are in a position where you can improve things. And for all those people, you do not have permission to regret bearing all the weight on your shoulders, you have to find solutions ”. The actress recalled this anecdote in an interview for the premiere of her second film as director, Invincible. An anecdote that today, in less hopeful times, is still valid. It is difficult to find an interview in which she does not pronounce the word hope, in different forms or declensions.
Around that optimism, Jolie has built her image in recent years. And she now she goes back to work asking for action. On May 7 she premieres the adrenaline thriller Those who wish my death, her first film as an actress since Frente al mar (2015) - that prophetic drama about the separation of a couple that she wrote, directed and co-starred with with her then husband - which it is not intended for children, like Maleficent. And, at the end of the year, Los Eternos will hit theaters, a new Marvel production directed by Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) and that represents a return to action for Angelina, adjusting a narrow golden jumpsuit.
In addition, the actress celebrates 20 years of her work as an ambassador for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, and will publish a book to help children and young people, Know your rights (and claim them) )], written with attorney Geraldine Van Bueren and Amnesty International. And, of course, she continues her socially-focused collaboration with beauty brands, like Guerlain. Many job news with a cherry on top: her next project as director, the biopic of photojournalist Don McCullin, on which she is already working.
Such a tight schedule is the best public relations strategy to redirect attention beyond her family situation. She behind she wants to leave the divorce and custody splashed again by accusations of mistreatment against Brad Pitt; and recover from the failure (partly caused by the pandemic) of her latest releases: Once upon a time and The Magnificent Ivan. Jolie does not want to allow others to continue taking advantage of her silence, she wants to regain control of what is said about her. A job that she, strangely in Hollywood, she has always done without a publicist or agent around her. “Often times advertisers are retaining walls rather than news generators. Someone like her does not need news to be made, she is the news. And few people can have that control as she does ”, explains Álvar Carretero de la Fuente, director of Awards PR & amp; Global Publicity at Joshua Jason PR agency in Los Angeles, specializing in awards campaigns, festivals and events.
As early as 2008, the New York Times featured a report on how she held the reins of her “orchestrated image of her”. According to the article, she agreed on the prices of the images of her children, diverted the conversation in interviews to her humanitarian causes and closed the opportunities for photos, apparently stolen, directly with the paparazzi. She thus she would have managed to turn the image of a rebellious youth of her during her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton to that of a committed mother with Pitt. And she became one of the most beloved in the Q Score index, which measures the sympathy of the stars and is used by producers as a profitability thermometer.
"Someone like her does not need news to be generated, she is the news. And few people can have that control as she does. She is a person who knows what she wants."
“Just because she doesn't have a publicist doesn't mean she's not advised by brilliant people,” insists Carretero de la Fuente, who worked with her on The Breadwinner's Oscar campaign, in which Jolie was an executive producer. "She is a person who knows what she wants, she with great confidence in what she does, she makes it very easy and has a very close team with which she works every detail." A team that remains faithful and loyal, away from the news. Like Mindy Nyby, who has been with her for years and has only recently appeared as a spokesperson for the actress when she changed the famous Hollywood divorce lawyer, Laura Wasser, for a less media and family expert, Samantha Bley Dejean.
THE STAR THAT BREAKS PREJUDICES
But Jolie is a rarity in an industry where nothing is left to chance. "I have never interviewed a major Hollywood star who was not surrounded by assistants or publicists ..." says Gill Pringle, a Los Angeles correspondent for British and Australian media such as The Times. That was one of the things that surprised me the most. I knew right away that she was talking to a grown woman who was capable of handling everything herself. " Starting with the look of her. Angelina always appears in interviews with little makeup, neutral clothing, comfortable, appropriate to the moment and even to the tone of the film, almost without jewelry. "She is stunning and she knows the effect that her beauty has on people," continues the English journalist. Next, she disarms her verbal and non-verbal communication, her posture before the press, her smiles and her tears. In 2014 I had the opportunity to interview her twice for Invincible, the biopic about the World War II pilot and Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini that she directed, and both times she ended up crying with a sincerity that knocks down any prejudice about her and humanizes that halo between mystery and myth that he has been cultivating since he began in the 90s.
When you are a young actress, they tell you not to get tattoos, not to cut your hair, stay like a blank canvas, "she said in 2001, in the first turn of her career, after the Oscar for Inocencia interrupted, by embodying to action hero Lara Croft. "But I couldn't, so I said, 'I'm going to shave my head, get tattoos in places you can't hide, and then I'm going to work." I wanted to have a strong, authentic personality that I felt comfortable with ”. 20 years later, so on. Angelina has stayed out of that vanity fair from the beginning, perhaps marked by a childhood in which her father, actor Jon Voight, disappeared while her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, had to give up her acting career to raise them. her and her brother.
She has always been the discordant note in Hollywood, first because of her extravagances, because in interviews she never seemed to follow a script and because, unlike Brad Pitt and as she has confessed, she does not have many friends in the industry. A fact that was clearly seen in 2016, after the announcement of the couple's divorce: he took refuge in parties, in other famous friends of hers and, later, in a provocative and triumphant awards campaign with the Tarantino film. Meanwhile, she preferred interviews that were narrated but selected and in depth, the silence and her role as director, producer and humanitarian ambassador to speak.
Although if there is a role that she has wanted to talk to since then, it is that of her mother. The photos of her with her children in supermarkets and stores where she buys any average American is the image that we have seen the most. Some will say that she is part of this "orchestrated image" of which she has an iron and clairvoyant control. Others that Angelina puts her children ahead. “Everyone came to the set [of Once Upon a Time] frequently. But they stayed in their dressing room, they went there to be with their mother, nothing more, ”says director Brenda Chapman. "It is talking about her children, and her work with young people as an activist, when Angelina Jolie comes to life," says Edward Enningful, director of British Vogue.
In those interviews for Invincible, Angelina spoke of forgiveness. Can you forgive everything? Her response may still be valid today: “It is a subject on which I have thought a lot. Could I forgive someone who has hurt me? Yes, it probably could. Someone who has hurt my children? I don't think I could. I also believe that there are times when what has to be justice, and changes ”, she reflected.
Angelina is a realistic optimist. The word hope for her is accompanied by justice so, then yes, to follow a path without pain. In that way she is. Demanding justice for her family and around the world, calling for more action, because she can't quell her punk spirit from her, and trying to keep hope. "I have to believe in her or Jane [Goodall] will be mad at me."
