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Ten years after they starred in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are returning to the silver screen in By the Sea. The couple who share six children together: Maddox, 14, Pax, 11, Zahara, 10, Shiloh, 9, and Vivienne and Knox, 7, - were an item for close to nine years before tying the knot in 2014.
Angelina and Brad held their wedding ceremony in France, but as it turns out, the 40-year-old actress reveals the moment she became Mrs. Pitt was much more "casual" than one would think. "The ceremony was in France, but we had to do things legally in California,” Angelina tells the New York Times.
Photo: GC Images
"One day I was in the edit room, and [Brad] was doing something and an assistant said, 'You have to sign some papers.' So we came back and between meetings we were told, 'Here’s your license,'" she continues. "Then someone said, 'The judge is outside.' We both said, 'What do you mean, the judge is outside?' Then the judge came in, this lovely guy, and at some point, Brad said, 'Shouldn’t we be standing up?' The judge said, ‘No.' Then suddenly we realized we were married, in the most unceremonial way possible.”
Photo: Universal Pictures
Making it official with the 51-year-old was a “nice thing,” the By the Sea director says, but the biggest moment in the couple's relationship was when they signed joint adoption papers for their children Maddox and Zahara. "That was a decision to parent together, to commit to being a part of each other’s lives for the rest of my life," she says. "So [marriage] wasn’t close in comparison."
After their wedding at their Château Miraval, which was featured in the pages of HELLO! magazine, the newlyweds packed up their family and flew to Malta to film the drama movie, which ironically centers on a couple's relationship in crisis. While the two bypassed an official honeymoon, Angelina calls working on the film “technically” one.
"A few days into filming I thought: This is such a bad idea. What was I thinking? This is going to destroy us before we’ve even gotten started. But by the time we got to the end of the film, we’d argued, challenged each other, disappointed each other, had good days, bad days, all of it," she explains. "We’d pushed through, learned something about each other, found a new working relationship and came to like the idea of ‘Yeah, it gets really bad, but you work it out.’ We are two very human, flawed people. And I think that’s a good thing to show."
Photo: GC Images
The mother-of-six not only directed the film but also wrote it, which proved to be a bit of a drawback for Brad. The Goodwill Ambassador recalls her husband saying, "‘It’s strange. You seem to have given me 10 times more dialogue in French than you’ve given yourself,’” to which she responded, “That’s the bonus of being the writer."
Jokes aside, the humanitarian also knew that she couldn't change things around just because she wasn't exactly comfortable with the situation. "There were lots of scenes I wanted to change or cut. I realized it was going to be me [naked] in that bathtub. But I told myself, put all of that aside," she shares. "Like, you can’t change or cut this scene because you’ve had a mastectomy, or because we’re married and people are going to analyze this or that. That would be cheating."
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By the Sea hit theaters on November 13.