The Oscar winner on how "Couture" challenged her assumptions about love, why she hasn't dated since her divorce and what her daughters are teaching her about herself.


Angelina Jolie on her personal new film, Couture, her daughters bringing her "back to my old self" and the questions she's asking herself at 51.

What parts of ourselves do we lose along the way? It's one of the questions at the heart of Couture, Angelina Jolie's new drama about a woman reassessing her life after a breast cancer diagnosis.

In the film, Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an American filmmaker who receives the life-altering health news while working in Paris during Fashion Week. Directed by Alice Winocour, the drama follows a woman forced to confront not only her mortality, but also the choices, relationships and identities that have shaped her life.

Like Maxine, Jolie is taking stock in midlife. When I ask whether the questions she's asking herself now are different from the ones she wrestled with decades ago, she doesn't hesitate.

"Oh, completely," she says, but then pauses: "Completely and maybe I've come around to being a little bit more the person I used to be."

Jolie continues, "I'm discovering something now that my daughters are older. They're talking to me as young women, and I'm seeing what I want for them. I'm seeing what I don't want them to lose and what I want them to hold on to. And it's kind of reminding me what I may have lost."

Jolie shares six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt: sons Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, and Knox, 17, and daughters Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and Vivienne, 17.

"I think in some way they're bringing me back to my old self," Jolie says of her girls. "My desire for them to have all of the strength and openness and softness and faith and ferocity is reminding me. I think they kind of want me now to not just be 'Mom.' There's a different room for me to be that woman again, that's not just a mom."

At 51, Jolie says she's spending little time thinking about aging. If anything, watching her children grow up has prompted an unexpected realization: The next chapter of her life may be less about becoming someone new than rediscovering parts of herself she thought she'd left behind.

Questions like those are at the heart of Couture, a film Jolie connected with on a deeply personal level. It's in theaters on Friday, June 26.

Having publicly navigated her own health journey, including undergoing a preventative double mastectomy in 2013 after learning she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, Jolie recognized something deeply authentic in Winocour's script.

"I think the shock, the push to move — there was something about it that just felt so realistic, even in reading it," she says.

Angelina Jolie is ready to "live again."
Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died from complications of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007. The actor could sense how personal the story was for Winocour, who drew from her own experiences.

"Nobody could write it had they not experienced it," Jolie says. "Very subtle things, but very real."

The feeling was mutual; Winocour says Jolie was the obvious choice for the role.

"Because it was so personal, I needed someone to play the part who had a special connection with the subject," the director says. "I think she shares with Maxine Walker this idea that she's a fighter. She's moving on."

Among the details that resonated most with Jolie were the small, often unspoken realities that follow devastating news.

"The way you almost debate the doctor, the way you keep thinking, I need to do this, these other things," she says. "You haven't quite switched your realities. You haven't quite accepted the gravity of what it is. You are both afraid and overwhelmed and don't know how to tell people you love."

Yet what moved Jolie most wasn't the diagnosis itself. It was the love story and Maxine's relationship with her cinematographer, played by French actor Louis Garrel.

"So often we see, when there's a project that's dealing with a woman's cancer, it's not often where her sexuality post-diagnosis is celebrated," she says.

When Jolie first read the script, she was struck by how intentionally Winocour approached that part of Maxine's story. The Oscar winner says the film challenges the idea that illness should become someone's sole identity.

"This was a part of continuing to live all aspects, to live to your last breath, right?" she explains. "And not to start living only as a patient."

That theme became especially meaningful in one of the film's most intimate scenes. Jolie acknowledges that exploring that side of her character forced her to confront some of her own assumptions.

"To be candid, I haven't dated since I divorced a decade ago," she says. "So I kind of get in my head that that aspect of me is not centered in my life if I'm focusing on my children, my family."

Playing Maxine, who has one daughter, reminded Jolie that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

"It took me a second to kind of say, well, she can also love her daughter and be dedicated to her daughter and also need this as a woman and receive this as a woman."

In the end, Jolie believes Couture's greatest love story isn't the romance at all, but the bond between a mother and daughter. It's also a reminder that life's most difficult moments can clarify what matters most.

For Jolie, that idea of reexamining priorities — and choosing what matters most — resonates far beyond the screen.

"So yes, things are changing, but in a way I didn't expect. It doesn't feel like I'm 51 and starting to think of being older. I'm thinking I have to live again. Be free again," she says. "In a way that maybe life has broken me a little bit."

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