When Angelina Jolie’s big Vanity Fair interview came out yesterday, most people were immediately drawn to all the quotes about Brad Pitt and the divorce.
Which is definitely understandable — there’s still a lot of dirt there that we don’t know about.
But the interview was so long, and she covered so many topics, the whole thing is really worth a second read-through, after you feel all your Brangelina feelings.
And when you do read it again, you may realize that there’s a seriously disturbing story tucked away in there.
Throughout the piece, Angelina’s upcoming film, First They Killed My Father, is discussed.
The film is based on Loung Ung’s memoir of the same name, and it’s about her experiences growing up in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Angelina directed it, and obviously an important part of making the movie was casting a child who would be able to act out such horrific moments.
So there were probably lots of auditions, right?
The cast is entirely Cambodian, so she probably just went over with a team and held auditions until the right child actor was found.
Except that’s not exactly how things went down.
According to an anecdote in Angelina’s profile, “To cast the children in the film, Jolie looked at orphanages, circuses, and slum schools, specifically seeing children who had experienced hardship.”
“In order to find their lead, to play Loung Ung, the casting directors set up a game, rather disturbing in its realism.”
The “game” in question went like this: “they put money on the table and asked the child to think of something she needed the money for, and then to snatch it away.”
“The director would pretend to catch the child, and the child would have to come up with a lie.”
Angelina recalled that Srey Moch, the girl selected to play the lead, “was the only child that stared at the money for a very, very long time.”
“When she was forced to give it back, she became overwhelmed with emotion. All these different things came flooding back.”
Then, she said, when they asked that poor little girl what she imagined using the money for, “she said her grandfather had died, and they didn’t have enough money for a nice funeral.”
So instead of behaving like people with hearts would, they pulled kids from orphanages and slums, dangled money in front of them and tried to get them to remember bad times?
Sounds like a brilliant move, right?
Just kidding — it actually sounds heartbreaking.
To taunt these poor children this way, and to then send most of them away because they didn’t suit their needs is just too sad.
And it seems like most people agree.
“Angelina Jolie deliberately re-traumatized children to make her movie, turning their lived experiences into entertainment,” one person wrote on Twitter.
Another tweeted “‘Humanitarian’ Angelina Jolie cast her new movie by giving poor Cambodian children money and then taking it away.”
One person even joked “The Hunger Games, except its Angelina Jolie auditioning you to be in a f-cked up movie.”
It’s really just a horrific story, and it’s hard to understand why Angelina even felt the need to include it here.
Or why a team of people thought their casting “game” was an acceptable thing to do in the first place.
