Long before Angelina Jolie divorced Brad Pitt, the actress was involved in a different high-profile breakup.
Yes, some of our younger readers may not even remember the days when Jolie was married to Billy Bob Thornton, but that relationship happened — and it was every bit as bonkers as it sounds.
When the 19-year age difference and the fact that one of you is named Billy Bob are not even the weirdest things about the relationship, you know you’ve got something special.
Thornton and Jolie met on the set of the 1999 film Pushing Tin, and they married the following year.
The marriage only lasted three years, but oh, the memorable moments they provided us with during that time.
Angie and Billy Bob wore vials of each other’s blood on necklaces.
They informed the whole world that they’d just had sex in the days before social media when we weren’t accustomed to knowing way too much about each other’s lives.
And of course, they got tattoos in one another’s honor, but we’re pretty sure Angie has commemorative ink for every human she’s ever crossed paths with, so that’s no biggie.
The point is, Billy Bob and Angie seemed to be head over heels for one another.
So where did it all go wrong?
Well, as you’re no doubt aware, Jolie is the jet-setting type — the kind of person who makes the entire party cringe when she describes herself as “a citizen of the world.”
Billy Bob, conversely, is more of a homebody, and in a recent podcast interview, he revealed that that’s ultimately what led to the end of his fifth marriage.
“Hers is a global lifestyle, and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle, so that’s really — that’s the only reason we’re probably not still together maybe, because of a different path in life we wanted to take,” Thornton said Wednesday.
“We just had different lifestyles.”
Thornton stated that he has only fond memories of his time with Jolie, a comment that his current wife (lucky number six!) might have mixed feelings about:
“I remember our time together as really being great,” Thornton said.
As for some of the wild behavior that he and Angelina engaged in, Billy Bob says much of it was exaggerated by a media that was at that time obsessed with Jolie’s eccentric ways.
“We had so much fun. A lot of the things [people] said about us at the time were exaggerated,” he said.
“It wasn’t as crazy as people wrote about it. You know what I mean?”
Thornton claimed the infamous blood necklaces were a prime example of this phenomenon:
“The necklaces were a very simple thing,” he said.
“‘Hey, let’s poke our fingers with a pen and smear a little blood on there, and when we’re away from each other, we’ll wear the necklace.’ It was that easy,” Billy Bob explained.
“But by the time it came out in the press, it sounded like we were wearing a bucket of blood around our necks.”
Well, when A-listers shed blood for any reason, it’s generally gonna make the tabloids.
It’s not quite what they mean by the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads,” but pretty close.
