BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 30, 2001 — Imagine Hollywood’s most intriguing actress and its most smoldering actor doing the horizontal tango for a film, the scenes turning out so steamy the rumors begin that their chemistry must spill over offscreen as well.
It’s all anyone can talk about. But the stars of Original Sin, Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie, are quick to dispel any gossip. As Banderas has famously said, “Melanie [Griffith, his wife] knows that whatever I do with Angelina in the movie, she gets every night — and for real.”
Regardless of the offscreen drama, Original Sin explores the depths of sexual obsession and deception, with Banderas as Luis, a wealthy businessman who sends away to America for a mail-order bride because he doesn’t believe in love. But when Julia (Jolie) steps off the boat, Luis finds himself in trouble — and in love.
“The character’s a bit naive at the beginning of the movie,” Banderas says. “He thinks that he’s in absolute control of everything in his life until this happens to him.”
When he finds out Julia is not what — or who — she seems, Luis goes on a search to hunt down the woman who, despite himself, he cannot get out of his mind.
“He wants to control her, and when you cannot do that, you may look like a victim, but he’s not. He just put himself in that position. Nobody pushed him,” Banderas says. “What he does is a need and a want. Somebody said that to me before; it’s true. You need that, and at the same time you want that. Finally he’s going to say to her, ‘You’re killing me, but I am going to just allow you to do so because I’d rather die being killed by you than without you.’ It’s control.”
The film is directed and adapted by Michael Cristofer, whose HBO movie Gia garnered Jolie her second Golden Globe and propelled her to worldwide notice. Filming the biopic of model Gia Carangi also gained notoriety for sending Jolie into a spiral of depression, concluding with a leave from acting and a divorce from her first husband, actor Jonny Lee Miller.
“It was extremely difficult to make. We had to shoot it in 20 some days, the entire film,” Cristofer recalls. “She had to run the gamut from being a fashion model to being a drug addict to being a young teenage innocent girl, day after day. She was exhausted when it was over, and I think she needed time to regroup. We took a lot out of her.”
But he sees Jolie, now seemingly in a state of peace and married to Billy Bob Thornton, as a different actress than the young girl he directed three years ago.
“I think she’s developed a little more craft than she used to have. Before, everything was very instinctive with her. I think she still has that, an instinctive way of getting to all the good stuff that’s inside of her, but her last four or five pictures, she seems to know a little more about the craft itself. She’s just gotten better.”
For Jolie, the set of Original Sin was also a hallmark time for her. Halfway through the shoot in Mexico, she flew to Los Angeles to accept her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted. She was also, unbeknownst to the press who suspected she might be dating her brother after kissing him in public, beginning a romance with Thornton.
“Towards the end of this film we knew we were going to be married,” Jolie recalls. “So a lot changed for me; that’s what this film was to me. The question of this film being whether somebody can accept you for who you truly are or whether love exists or whether you can allow yourself to hope. All those things were very real to me at this time.”
And while Jolie relished playing the femme fatale who has new secrets up every one of her hoopskirts, she didn’t adapt easily to wearing, well, the actual hoopskirts.
“It’s very awkward for me, but it’s part of a character and it’s part of the period,” the jeans-and-T-shirt-loving actress says. “That’s so [part of] that period in history, with the corsets and all the hair things. I don’t know how they did it. It’s hard to breathe. It’s impractical. It makes you just want to put some jeans on and ride a horse properly.”
