By Tim Nasson
LOS ANGELES — “I am a size 36C in real life,” Angelina Jolie says, laughing hard.
Why, you may ask, is she revealing her `real’ breast size? Because in her new movie, “Tomb Raider,” Jolie explains that there are many special effects, one of them being the size 38D her breasts become. “You gotta love those computer effects guys,” she says, of her accentuated figure on screen. “Too bad it’s not that easy to make them bigger in real life.” Jolie admits to having her lips injected with silicone to give them their seductive look.
In addition to the special effects used on Jolie, there are many more to behold in “Tomb Raider,” another of the summer’s action films destined to explode at the box office.
Not seen on screen since winning an Academy Award for “Girl, Interrupted,” Jolie says, “I needed to do something different. Yeah, I played a tough bitch in `Girl, Interrupted,’ but I play it even tougher in `Tomb Raider.’ Lara Craft is not to be f@cked with.”
Jolie is renowned for being a bad girl and for not caring what convention thinks about her choices in life. She admits to having had lesbian affairs. “Big deal,” she said to me about them. “I am not going to hide whomever it is I happen to be in love with. If it happens to be a woman, and at times it has been, then tough shit if you don’t like it,” she says.
Right now, Jolie, like Anne Heche, seems to be off her lesbian roll. “I am very happily married to Billy Bob Thornton. Though we hardly see each other — we’re always working on movies, thousands of miles away from each other — we are definitely in love with each other.”
Many kids (or kids at heart) may be familiar with the character Lara Croft, whom Jolie plays in “Tomb Raider.” Croft, of course, has been around for years as the main character in many “Tomb Raider” video games, where she’s been fueling the fantasies of many adolescent straight boys and lesbians. In fact, the animated Lara Croft is so aggressively buxom, she no doubt has been the object of adults fantasies as well. “No real woman could ever look as perfect as the Lara in video games does,” Jolie says. “I am thrilled that the producers of the movie thought I would capture her essence on screen, but, honestly, it was intimidating playing her. She is anatomically perfect.”
As Renee Zellweger does in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Angelina Jolie takes on a British accent in “Tomb Raider” since the film is set in Britain. Instead of being “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” this “lady Indiana” is caught in a “Temple of 10,000 Shadows.” Locations, though primarily in England, also included the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia and some outdoor shots in Iceland.
“Tomb Raider” seems to be a family affair. Right off his stint as FDR in another summer hit, “Pearl Harbor,” Jolie’s father, Jon Voight, plays her father in “Tomb Raider,” too.
“The casting director actually suggested I ask my father if he wanted the role so I called him up,” Jolie says. “I never call him so he thought something was wrong — that perhaps I had gotten into an accident. When I calmed him down and told him that I was not pregnant or sick and that he was wanted in a movie, he was relieved.”
Not only does Voight play opposite his daughter in “Tomb Raider,” he also had to sport the same British accent. “We helped each other out on that,” says Jolie.
Jolie reveals that she was not afraid of any of the stunts in the film and — if insurance allowed — she would have done all of the stunts herself. “They wouldn’t let me, though,” she said sadly. “I have no fear of heights, so that was no problem but a few times they put their feet down,” she says of the production crew, “and told me I was gonna end up killing myself if I was not more careful. I am so not afraid of death, though. When it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.”
Jolie even had input as to what some of the sets used for furniture. “My bedroom in the film features an electric chair,” she says. “I asked for that. Billy Bob and I have a real electric chair in our bedroom in our house so I thought it would be cool to have one in the bedroom on the set of `Tomb Raider,’ too.”
Though not Ms. Congeniality and more like Ms. Controversiality, Jolie is still in her prime and happy to have been picked for so many great roles in her still young career. She has won two Emmys, one for her role as the lesbian model “Gia” who died of AIDS, and another for portraying George Wallace’s wife.
If “Tomb Raider” is the hit she hopes it will be she is in fine shape — she’s already signed options to star in two “Tomb Raider” sequels.
Angelina Jolie Interview with Tim Nasson for Tomb Raider
