(NBC)
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were featured on Monday’s “Today” in a rare joint interview. Watch below!
As Gossip Cop reported, the couple sat down with Tom Brokaw to discuss their marriage and upcoming movie, By The Sea, as well as Jolie’s health battles. In the wake of her mother’s death from ovarian cancer and discovering she has the mutated BRCA gene, the actress had a double mastectomy and, later, the removal of her ovaries. As it turns out, her mother inspired the surgeries… as well as their film.
“The doctor that did my ovary surgery was my mother’s doctor. And apparently my mother had said to her, ‘Promise me you will take Angie’s ovaries out,'” revealed Jolie. “So when we kind of got together, we both had a big cry, and she said, ‘I promised your mother, and I gotta do this.'”
Reflecting on when Jolie first found out about her genetic testing results, Pitt shared, “I was out in France, and Angie called me and I got straight on a plane to return. Seeing my wife have to be her strongest and knowing that it’s the scariest news is terribly moving. And not being there is a horrible feeling.”
“There was no vanity to my wife’s approach. ‘This is our life and we’re gonna make the best of it.’ There was a strength in that,” Pitt went on to say. “It was just another one of those things in life that makes you tighter, and she was doing it for the kids, and she was doing it for her family so we could be together.”
So, what does all this have to do with By The Sea? Jolie told Brokaw, “We can’t say what the whole film is about, but a lot of the film was when I went to visit my mom in the hospital, when she found out she had cancer the first time, she was gonna have her ovaries removed, (and) she was very upset, feeling like… they’re taking out her parts that were female, and there was a woman down the hall who was wailing. I later found out it was a young woman who had not had children yet, and that put everything into perspective.”
It remains to be seen how that figures into the film, which, on the surface, seems to be about a couple’s crumbling marriage. Check out video of the full “Today” segment below!
