Billy Bob Thornton Opens Up About Where Things Stand With Angelina Jolie 20 Years After Their Split
Two decades after their split, Landman star Billy Bob Thornton says the warmth with ex-wife Angelina Jolie endures, calling their breakup civilized and handled with respect in a recent interview.
Billy Bob Thornton is looking back at his marriage to Angelina Jolie and, shocker: it was happy, grown-up, and ended without fireworks. Years after the tabloids moved on, he says they stayed friends and the supposed weirdness around them was mostly media spin.
How they remember it now
Talking to Rolling Stone, the Oscar winner and current Landman star said he still feels warmly about that stretch of his life, and that the split was handled like adults. The reason they broke up, according to him, was simple: different lifestyles, not drama.
"Angelina [Jolie] and I had a great time together. That was one of the greatest times of my life. She and I are still very, very close friends. And that was the one that ended up being a really civilized breakup. We simply split up because our lifestyles were so different."
The fame tilt and the circus around it
Thornton also says the public frenzy around the relationship was bizarre from the inside. When they first met, he considered himself the more famous one. Once they became a couple, that flipped, and the attention machine kicked into overdrive. Suddenly they could barely go anywhere without it becoming a thing, and any offhand comment they made got chopped into sound bites.
About those blood necklaces
Yes, the blood story. Thornton says the lockets were exactly that: small lockets with a tiny drop of each other's blood, meant as a romantic gesture. By the time the tabloids were done, the narrative had turned them into dungeon-dwelling vampires. His point: the reality was mundane; the coverage was not.
Where they stand now
According to Thornton, they parted respectfully and stayed close. Jolie has echoed that in her own recent interviews, saying they still care about each other.
So, not the gothic saga you might remember. More like two people who liked each other a lot, realized their day-to-day lives didn't match, and chose not to torch the place on the way out.