Real-life Celebrity Breakup: Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton

Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. A fractious reel life romance carried over into the real world where the intense passion just couldn’t be sustained.

Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton – Whirlwind

Jolie and Thornton met on the set of the 1999 aviation dramady Pushing Tin, but neither pursued the other, owning to the fact that she was seeing Timothy Hutton and he was engaged to long-time girlfriend Laura Dern.

However, by early 2000, the one-time co-stars were a hot-and-heavy item. On May 5 of that year, after two months of courting, the duo headed to Las Vegas, walked inside the Little Church of The West Wedding Chapel, and selected the “Beginning package.”

During the ceremony, the ponytailed bride wore light-wash jeans and a gray sleeveless T-shirt; the groom’s ensemble – black slacks, matching boots, and a dark patterned shirt – was complimented by a black baseball cap embossed with a John Deere logo.

Subsequent to the newlyweds deeming, scorned fiancée Dern explained to Talk Magazine, “I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again. It’s like a sudden death. For no one has there been any closure or clarity.”

Wild n’ Crazy
The resultant three-year union was characterized by obnoxious displays of affections, brandings via expressive tattoos, wild sexual claims – chief among them an assignation inside a film premiere-bound limousine and the covering of their bedroom with padding – and the donning of baubles apparently filled with each other’s blood.

On the final point, Thornton offers an explanation. “You know those lockets you buy that are clear and you put a picture of your grannie in it or something like that and wear it around your neck? That’s what it was…We were apart a lot because she’s off making Tomb Raider and I’m making Monster’s Ball. We were on opposite ends—we see each other for two weeks and whatever.

“She thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razorblade and sliced our fingers, smeared a little blood on these lockets and you wear it around your neck just like you wear your son or daughter’s baby hair in one. Same thing. From that we were wearing quart jars of blood around our necks. And we were vampires and we lived in a dungeon.”

First Anniversary Presents
In observance of their paper anniversary, the Thorntons exchanged some rather interesting gifts. Jolie presented her husband with his ‘n’ her burial plots and in turn, received a signed document saying he would be with her forever.

On the subject of her gesture, Jolie conceded, “It may sound a bit weird to people, but it is very special for us,” she continued. “I’d called his mother to find out where a lot of his family are buried and I reserved plots there so that one day, when we die, we’ll be next to each other. That meant a lot to him.” Apparently not enough to stay together.

Angelina Jolie and Billy Bon Thornton Call It Quits

In March 2002, the Thornton’s announced that they would be adopting a child from Cambodia but a mere three months later, reports surfaced that they had separated and the young boy had merely been adopted by Jolie as a single woman. One year later, the marriage was dissolved.

Reflections
In an interview originally printed in Vogue, Jolie said that the divorce, “Took me by surprise too, because overnight, we totally changed. I think one day he had just nothing in common. And it’s scary but…I think it can happen when you get involved and you don’t know yourself yet.”

Echoing his ex’s sentiment, Thornton told Entertainment Weekly, “I don’t think either one of us knows why we split up.” He also explained that “it was like, say you’re going to a nightclub one night with your friends and you’re in line and the next thing you know there are guys with helicopters and there’s machine-gun fire and you don’t know what happened. And that’s kind of like what our breakup was like.”

Seventeen years later, during a podcast conducted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Thornton explained the event’s catalyst thusly. “We just had different lifestyles. Hers is a global lifestyle and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle,” he joked. “So that’s really, that’s the only reason we’re probably not still together, maybe. There was a different path in life we wanted to take.”