2020s celebrity couples love to pretend they’re not in public. Maybe they’ll be spotted a few times at the flower market, then a few months later on the red carpet. Maybe they’ll have a low-key date night, but everything is very demure, like “Mom and Dad hired a babysitter.”
But that wasn’t the case with Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, the sexy poster couple of the early 2000s, known for things like wearing vials of each other’s blood around their necks and kissing.
Here are some fun facts about Angelina and Billy: The two met on the set of Pushing Tin, a weird 1990s flop about air traffic, and then eloped to Las Vegas, even though he was still with Laura Dern at the time (imagine your boyfriend just randomly marrying someone else).
She was 24 at the time, he was 44, and had been married four times. These little tidbits may surprise people now. But with their tattoos, leather pants, unbuttoned shirts and tiny sunglasses, the couple was cool and a bit “vampire-like.” Although Angelina and Brad Pitt became a more famous couple a few years later, we still sometimes think of her and Billy Bob’s couple style.
In terms of vibe, the couple gave off a sense of the lawlessness of classic cult movies (think: Leila and Billy in Buffalo 66, Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, Clarence and Alabama in True Romance).
It’s like, if they weren’t A-list actors, they might commit crimes in a diner on the side of the highway or be on the run and hide out in a seedy motel. Yet here they were at the premiere in West Hollywood, making out for the camera, with Jolie showing off her new Billy Bob tattoo from time to time – a tribal-style lizard that she would remove a few years later – and him wearing various hats and sexy tattoos.
While many people consider Angie and Billy Bob to be Hollywood’s “glam girl meets hot rock star” couple – with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee being the pioneers of the genre – the two had very different styles.
Angelina often wore grunge-style straight jeans and plain tank tops (including on her wedding day), while Billy Bob tended to opt for ’70s-style open-front shirts and rosary beads. More accurately, they were a pair of sexy weirdos who were brought together by a shared passion. He was the son of an Arkansas psychic, and she was a bisexual rebel in Girl, Interrupted, and together they became the center of attention.
We all know what happened next. The two divorced after three years of marriage, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie continued to cover up their little romance for the rest of the early 2000s. But the couple apparently remained good friends (and the eternal source of mood board inspiration).
Years later, Billy Bob claimed that many of the weird aspects of their relationship were exaggerated. “It’s not as crazy as people make it out to be,” he said in an interview with the HFPA’s “Conversation” podcast.
As for those vials of blood? Well, they were just a few drops of blood… not like buckets or anything. “The necklace was simple: ‘Hey, we poke our finger with a pen, put some blood on it, and when we’re apart we wear the necklace.’ That’s it,” he said. OK!