Although playing Gia was by far her most challenging role to date, Jolie and Carangi had a lot in common and there can be no doubt that the actress drew on a lot of her own experiences when it came to portraying the model. Both women felt like outsiders when they were growing up, both had experimented with their sexuality, both were models and suffered at the hands of the fickle industry and, most importantly, both women had let drugs come to play a part in their life. While Jolie’s experimentation with drugs was nowhere near as serious or problematic as Gia’s addiction, her experience must have helped her to understand this aspect of the model’s character. That said, Jolie had little time for the character to whom she was dedicating so much of her energy. After seeing her doing an interview on a show called 20/20 in 1983, Jolie came to the conclusion that the model was false and unlikeable, saying, ‘I hated her. She spoke with this affected accent and was acting her butt off.’
She may not have liked Carangi, but playing her was certainly helpful to Angelina in the sense that it showed her a path she didn’t want to go down. ‘I’ve definitely needed to learn the lessons Gia needed to learn. Especially feeling that the physical is more important than anything else, or that you’re only as smart as good as somebody thinks you are. It’s been really important for me to look at myself in the mirror and realise that I can’t let myself go down like she did.’ And she was the first to admit that she and the model shared some similarities. ‘She was a lot like me, although the key to her was she needed to be loved. I want to be understood. Maybe that’s the same. She was a good person who self-destructed when things went bad.’
Playing Gia may have troubled the actress, but the film’s director, Michael Cristofer, was certain he’d made the right choice in casting her and had nothing but praise for Jolie’s attitude. ‘She’s a hunter,’ he said. ‘I think most of us are cowards; we live at home in our nice little worlds, and the artists are the ones who come along, the adventurers, who go out into the dark away from the campfire, and then they come back and tell us the story of their adventures. She’s one of those people. Life is an adventure for her.’
Jolie had always been incredibly candid about her life, and has always maintained that her fans should know all her flaws and weaknesses so as to have a realistic view of her, and not assume that because she’s in the public eye her life is perfect. Jolie says, ‘Wouldn’t it be more helpful for a young girl to know of the things I’ve discovered, the mistakes I’ve made, of how human I am, and how like her I am? That’s more interesting than, “Here is how much stuff she has and how fabulous her life is.”’
Jolie has a point, but there’s one topic which the actress has always remained far more tight-lipped about – presumably through fear of being a negative role model – and that topic is heroin.
While she is fairly open about other drugs she has experimented with, Jolie has said very little about her use of heroin, although she has gone as far as to admit that she liked it and that at one point it ‘meant a lot to her’. And, if Jonny Lee Miller did one thing for Jolie while they were together, it was to get her away from the life-threatening situations she had previously put herself in. Jolie says, ‘I have done just about every drug possible. Cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and, my favourite, heroin. Although I have been through a lot of dark days, Jonny helped me see the light.’ When pushed on the topic of her use of heroin, however, Jolie stated flatly, ‘I don’t want to go into detail.’
The actress is far more open about other drugs, such as cannabis, and recalls how, of all the drugs she took, it had the biggest effect on her. ‘The worst effect, oddly enough, was pot, which made me feel out of control and I became silly and giggly. I liked LSD for a while until I went to Disneyland and started thinking about Mickey Mouse being a short middle-aged man in a costume who hates his life. My brain went the other way and I started thinking, “Look at all those fake flowers, the kids are on leashes, the parents hate being here.” Those drugs can be dangerous. I know friends who are no longer happy or interesting, living for junk all the time and using people.’
Angelina’s drug use certainly didn’t make her dad happy, and Voight’s brother Chip Taylor says that it was her teenage rebellion that ensured the father–daughter relationship’s rocky path. ‘She had some drug issues and Jon was real concerned about that, and then she did all this cutting herself, and the tattoos…’
Obviously Jon found most of his daughter’s lifestyle decisions hard to understand and this is a theme that would continue in their relationship until the present day.
She may have put all personal relationships on hold for her part in Gia, but the hard work and sacrifices paid off and in 1999 Jolie won two awards for her portrayal of the tragic figure – a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Mini-Series or TV Film and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Female Actor in a TV Movie or Mini-Series.
Ironically, considering the critical acclaim her performance would garner, Angelina felt disillusioned and exhausted by the end of Gia and had decided yet again to quit her profession for a while, saying, ‘I felt like I’d given everything I had and I couldn’t imagine what else was in me.’
Having spent months in the shoes of someone who was incredibly successful professionally but personally unfulfilled, Jolie was terrified that, if she carried on making films but having no home life to speak of, she’d end up like Gia. ‘I was scared of getting public after that part, and seeing how undernourished her private life was, how malnourished she was, though her exterior was very glamorous,’ admitted Jolie. ‘So I’d be doing interviews and then going home by myself not knowing if I’d ever be in a relationship or good in marriage or a good mother or… complete as a woman.’
This feeling of apathy and lack of direction in her life caused Jolie to sink into another depression, which would again cause her to contemplate ending it all. But this time, Jolie had no intention of doing the deed herself and subsequently went to the dramatic lengths of actually hiring a hitman to kill her.
‘This is going to sound insane, but there was a time I was going to hire somebody to kill me. The person spoke very sweetly to me, he made me think about it for a month. And, after a month, other things changed in my life and I was surviving again. With suicide comes all the guilt of people around you thinking they could have done something. With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility.’
Receiving the awards for Gia had again given Jolie the reassurance she needed and she finally felt like her contribution to the arts mattered. ‘Gia came out and people responded to it. Suddenly it seemed like people understood me. I thought my life was completely meaningless and that I would never be able to communicate anything and that there was nobody who understood… and then I realised that I wasn’t alone. Somehow life changed.’
Her success in two major TV roles had given her the platform she required to further her film career. With her marriage to Jonny Lee Miller over and her depression behind her, Jolie was ready to move on, both professionally and personally.
While Jolie’s professional confidence was boosted by her warmly received TV roles, she had yet to become a big hitter on the Hollywood circuit, despite going out of her way to fight for roles that didn’t just require her to look beautiful on screen. ‘I’m having to do a lot just to keep my clothes on and not be cast in girlfriend roles,’ she admitted in an interview she did with her father in June 1997.
Ironically, when Jolie made this statement she was in the middle of filming Hell’s Kitchen, in which she played Gloria McNeary, the girlfriend of a robber, and had just finished filming Playing God, where she played Claire, the love interest of both Eugene Sands