Last Thursday we got our first look at the new issue of W magazine which features Angelina Jolie breastfeeding one of her twin babies on the cover (a photo that was shot by Brad Pitt). The feedback that I’ve received and read about the photo has been overwhelmingly positive and many folks mentioned how anxious they are to see the other photos of Angelina that were shot by Brad for publication in W magazine. W mag has updated their website with a sampling of photos from the issue as well as the magazine’s coverstory wherein Ange talks about her kids’ favorite toys (knives), her new movie Changeling, her relationship with Brad and, of course, the twins:
Every family has its unique rites of passage, those generational milestones that mark a child’s growth and remind parents of their own similar experiences, years earlier. In the Jolie-Pitt household, one such event is the day a kid begins collecting daggers. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s seven-year-old son, Maddox, like many boys his age, has lately developed a fondness for guns and knives, and Jolie proudly notes that the predilection runs in the family. “My mom took me to buy my first daggers when I was 11 or 12,” she recalls. “And I’ve already bought Maddox some things. We take him to a special shop.” She emphasizes that the knife blades are dulled so they’re not dangerous, and that the purchases are accompanied by discussions about violence. But, she says, “we also talk about samurais and about the idea of defending someone as good. We talk about everything” … Shortly after I’m escorted onto the 988-acre property where the family has been living since June, Jolie, who moments before was breastfeeding her seven-week-old twins, zooms up the dirt driveway in a Yamaha all-terrain vehicle, wearing a long black dress and dark sunglasses, her hair whipping in the wind. A bit later, as Jolie maneuvers the ATV over a series of potholed trails while giving a tour of the compound’s Provence-perfect vineyards, forests and olive groves, she inadvertently steers us into an area where local hunters are tracking wild boar. “Bonjour!” she shouts to one bemused man who’s armed with a rifle, before driving us back toward a cross fire–free zone. As she sits down for the interview in a stone cottage, Jolie apologizes for perhaps seeming a little drained. Pitt has been away at the Toronto Film Festival, so she’s had the six kids to herself. (There are nannies, of course, including the couple’s first part-time live-in helper; Jolie says she and Pitt were starting to get “loopy” while attending to the twins and trying to find enough time for the others, so for now someone stays over a few nights a week.) But if the actress is overwhelmed, or if she’s savoring this rare break from round-the-clock feedings and diaper changes, she doesn’t show it. She brightly mentions that she and Pitt intend to add at least one more child to the mix … Fierce maternal instincts also lie at the heart of Jolie’s latest film, Changeling, which debuted at Cannes this past spring and opens in the U.S. in October … As intrigued as Jolie was by the story, she initially balked at signing on for a project whose plot revolved around child abduction. “I was concerned to just even put that in my head,” she says. “I didn’t want the idea of a kidnapping around me.” She adds that for both Pitt and her, losing a child would be intolerable—worse than losing each other. “I love Brad, and he loves me,” she says, “but something happening to the kids…” It’s often been observed, rightly or wrongly, that Jolie has completely changed Pitt, transforming the Sexiest Man Alive into a tireless international do-gooder in her own image. She says Pitt has profoundly changed her … “When we first met, he talked about having children in that way. I talked about only adopting children,” she says. After they had agreed that Pitt would adopt Maddox and Zahara, she recalls, “he stopped talking about having other kids in the other way. So I suppose in my heart I realized that he was happy with them as his children, completely. I knew he would never see them as different, and that gave me a certain peace. Then I suppose I just looked at him and loved him and just felt open to [getting pregnant]. I suddenly wanted to. It’s one of those things you can’t explain” … when Jolie talks about the twins and their siblings, she does so freely and openly; her stories are a lot like any young mother’s, despite that each one could potentially launch an Associated Press news bulletin. (If you must know: Zahara and Pax like to slow dance together, imitating Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty; newborn Vivienne is “sturdier” and “more demanding” than her brother Knox, who is “very chill” and “loves music,” taking after his father.) But for insights into life chez Jolie-Pitt, the photographs accompanying this story are perhaps more revealing than anything Jolie might discuss in an interview. Jolie says she prefers to let the photo series speak for itself, though it’s clear she’s an avid enabler of Pitt’s burgeoning photography habit. (For Christmas she surprised him with a Littman 45 Single camera.) “I love his photography,” she says. “Some people have a hobby, and they find the quickest way to it and are very pleased with the outcome right away. But he’s someone who will really study the camera—he’ll get the most complicated one and really understand the science behind it. And he’s very critical of his own work. I’ll see a photograph and think it’s amazing, but he’ll see all the different reasons why it can be better, and he’ll work very, very hard to improve it.” Pitt took these pictures a few weeks after the twins were born. Many new mothers might have hesitated to model, half dressed, for a 30-some-page magazine portfolio, but not Jolie, who doesn’t find that pregnancy has made her body any less attractive. “I’m with a man who’s evolved enough to look at my body and see it as more beautiful, because of the journey it has taken and what it has created,” she says. “He genuinely sees it that way. So I genuinely feel even sexier.”
Yes, I have to agree that the story told by the intimate photos shot by Brad tell a much more rich, fascinating story than her interview with the magazine does. Anyone familiar with W magazine knows that they tend to publish many, many photos within their pages. The print version of W will, very likely, include many more photos of Angelina, the kids, etc. shot by Brad Pitt (a “30-some-page magazine portfolio” apparently). I am very surprised that the family chose to be so open, so soon after the birth of their newest children. It’s a side of the family that really appeals to me. They may keep to themselves on a regular basis but in instances like this interview with W, they really seem to outdo themselves.
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