Ce n'est pas Jolie

A year ago there was a disturbing profile on Angelina Jolie in The Hollywood Reporter. It spooked me. The piece promoted her then heavily anticipated movie Maria; a biopic on Maria Callas. As if Callas hadn’t been through enough in her life, she certainly did not deserve this completely weird interpretation of her by Jolie. The set pieces were divine Parisian opulence but within them a morose over-acting, painfully detached Jolie lived as the once legendary, complex and dynamic opera singer. I found the film simply horrible, and not because of the tragedy of Callas’s story. And for the record: I am an enormous fan of Jolie’s work. Gia and Girl, Interrupted in particular are uncontained beautiful madness. Also, her face.

Worse was this odd profile of Jolie. It unsettled me. I do not revel in the lowlife popular sport of negging on, or tearing apart, over-exposed female film stars. This is not that. The profile of Jolie jolted stark memories of mine from across my prior career within the inner sanctum of celebrity; stark because of the naked fragility of so many superstars. There’s always war going on behind their curtains. Inside the mind. A place nobody looks without a motive. The doctors want to cure. The journalists want to pry. The collaborators want to occupy. The family wants to cash in. It becomes a gravy train full of needy passengers, and a chamber of secrets to be guarded. Celebrity life can be freakish. Onlookers will call it “mystery”, but often it is a permanent state of not belonging. The isolation of the cage of fame often leaves a crack in the chateau windows where deviants climb in and offer escape, or rescue or “meaning”. Causes for the sensitive. Titles that create purpose. That sort of thing. With no fresh air coming into the room, it’s easy for the subject to be sold false goods.

Jolie is prime bait for this. “I’m a very deeply feeling person and kind of a raw nerve,” she said in that profile. She spoke about her deep discomfort with being a public person. She kept up an iron wall of emotion with the interviewer. She talked about how she had not allowed herself to feel anything – numb for years of her life. She detailed how she hides all the pain and fear she carries from her children. She talked about her current family home as though it was a prison for her, although protective for her kids. When asked who her friends are, who she calls at 3am, she said: “I don’t have those kinds of relationships”. She offered that Maria Callas died with only two people she trusted. “Maybe it’s being somebody who’s been betrayed a lot. I don’t have a lot of those warm, close relationships as much that I lean on.”

I don’t mean to judge but the interview read like it was being given by the unhappiest woman alive. Having nobody to call at 3am is an unthinkable choice.

So this morning when I saw that Jolie has gone to Gaza, I was not surprised. For these are the Hollywood candidates for propagandists. They are prize pawns; accustomed to being used by people from the day their careers began, and happy to lend their faces to whatever the few people who are allowed anywhere near them tell them is good for their profile, particularly when said profile is becoming less and less relevant. And how do those few people keep their place? In all my years spent in the entertainment industry, I have rarely ever seen a team surrounding the talent who is doing something genuinely creative, over pursuing a basic formula. After all, if it doesn’t work, the conveyor belt keeps rolling.

What’s more basic in 2026 than sending your disappearing film star to Gaza? So off she went with the Egyptians. That’s right. She went to the Rafah crossing. Good for her, reminding the world that Gaza also shares a border with Egypt! And good for Egypt for finally opening the impossible to get through gigantic wall that they erected into Gaza for Ms Jolie. Lucky girl. After all this time, the gates to Gaza magically flung open. Poof. Jolie clearly has the right connections, unlike the Gazan civilians who were not offered safe passage into Egypt at all during the entirety of the Gaza war. In fact, those who tried to escape through the Rafah crossing were held.

Jolie’s little war region jaunt has avoided Israel, even though her audience is obsessed with that one other state that borders Gaza. On her trip she will not be visiting Kibbutz Kfar Aza or the killing fields of Re’im. She won’t be stopping by any of the massacre sites in the Gaza envelope to witness the war crimes of Hamas on October 7. Instead she is at the Rafah crossing to assess the “humanitarian aid” situation in Gaza. Let’s wait to learn the results, shall we?

It is an odd choice from Jolie to focus her advocacy on Israel’s failings now that the war is more or less kaput. Especially odd to target Israel specifically and at this border given that Egypt provided not a stitch of aid to the Gazan civilians during the war (Israel provided hundreds of trucks per week). Jolie could assess the aid situation in Gaza from her home in Los Feliz if she wanted to peruse the COGAT website. Those people she has in her ear probably did not tell her about COGAT. Would have saved a very long flight, likely private jet. Oh well. For future reference, Ange:

But benefit of the doubt. Jolie wants to see things for herself. So hopefully she will be asking all the deeply important questions to the Egyptians who have ferried her in. Prod them on why they haven’t done anything to help their neighbors at war. Unless she’s there to lipstick-stamp their lies, masking the reality that their efforts pale in comparison to the 4,000+ trucks of aid per week that Israel provided. Perhaps she just needed the current en vogue location to take selfies with sad concerned face, between takes making the Rafah crossing her runway…

Walk, walk, fashion, baby. Work it, move that bitch crazy.

Anyway, I’m not the only one questioning Jolie’s credentials. She has been widely derided as the useful idiot she has become. Middle Eastern analysts and reporters are somewhat curious about her approach to assessing the humanitarian crisis. Asking questions too about why Jolie uttered not one single word about the hostage crisis for two and a half years. Nada. What an embarrassment. Instead she showed up when the narrative could be framed to suit her own politics, however inconsistent they may be. She may as well be on a film set performing a stunt. An actor.

Her father Jon Voight, who I’ve brushed shoulders with at many a pro-Israel event here in LA over the last two years, has also expressed shame with his daughter, claiming that her ignorance is inspired by “antisemitic people” in her circles. Apparently antisemites aren’t the sorts of friends you can call at 3am.

Aren’t you exhausted by all this attention-seeking? I know I am. I’m fatigued of lost and flailing celebrities lending their egos to phony apostles, instead of - I don’t know - signing up for half a dozen EMDR sessions.

Yas queen, etc.

Clearly it’s not fun being Angelina Jolie, but let’s pray she can find a cure to her loneliness, her lack of faith, her idle hands, that isn’t aiding and abetting terrorist propagandists. Take up pottery classes, for fuck’s sake.

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Today will be the seventh day of Iran’s uprising. The fibbing legacy media is presenting this all as “economic” protests.

Iranians are not performing an “economic protest”. They are uprising against the oppressive Islamic regime that has destroyed their lives since 1979. If Jolie cared at all about humanitarian action, she’d be right beside us, holding out for the roar that will finally clinch freedom for the lions of Iran. Instead she’s butchering her legacy. Loser.

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