Angelina Jolie Says Her “Fighting Spirit Is Finally Back” After Years of Being “Taken Down”
As her most personal film yet prepares to open, Angelina Jolie speaks candidly about the toll of her divorce, her complicated relationship with mortality, and why she considers staying private — in 2026 — an act of rebellion.
Angelina Jolie has spent years keeping the world at arm’s length. Promoting Couture, the film opening June 26 in which she plays a director blindsided by a breast cancer diagnosis, she is letting some of it back in.
“I think my fighting spirit is finally back,” Jolie said in a joint interview with the film’s director, Alice Winocour. “I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it’s coming back in large part thanks to my children, who are now older, and encouraging it.” The remark landed as a quiet acknowledgment of the years-long legal battle with Brad Pitt that consumed much of her private life. Their divorce, initiated in 2016, was not legally resolved until 2024.
Jolie said she had effectively stopped acting before the split, intending to focus on directing and humanitarian work. The divorce forced a course correction. “The only way to be home more and for short periods of time being away or to make a good amount of money was to go back to acting,” she explained. “I was only taking things that were short or close by or I could take [my children].”
Winocour wrote the role of Maxine — a low-budget horror director juggling a fashion commission, single motherhood, and a cancer diagnosis — specifically for Jolie. “I needed someone special, someone that would have a special connection with the story,” the director said. “Angelina has a lot in common with the character.” The parallel is concrete: Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation. Her mother died from ovarian cancer at 56.
She told Variety she raises her six children “almost preparing them for my absence and not as much preparing to be a grandmother. That’s what happens when you consider death as a reality.”
Jolie described her current relationship with privacy as a kind of punk stance — doing less, staying out of the noise, resisting the pull of every public moment as its own form of defiance. “Sometimes the doing less, or being private, when the world is the way it is right now, that is an opposite,” she said.
Her children, most of them now approaching or past 18, have become the engine of her re-emergence. “They want to see me traveling the world, they want me to get out and do things,” she said. “They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot.”
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