Billy Bob Thornton is reflecting on his marriage to Angelina Jolie.
The 70-year-old actor addressed the infamous claim that he and his ex-wife once wore necklaces with vials of each other’s blood during an interview with Rolling Stone, published Monday. However, according to Thornton, those tubes of their blood never actually “existed.”
“We each had a little locket, literally with a drop of blood in them,” he clarified. “That’s a romantic little idea, and that’s all that was.
“But by the time it’s over, we’re vampires. We live in a dungeon, we drink each other’s blood, and this kind of stuff,” he said of the public’s response.
He also gushed over his three-year marriage to Jolie from 2000 to 2003 and the friendship they have now.
“Angelina and I had a great time together,” Thornton said. “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 Landman star recalled how the paparazzi followed him and Jolie around when they were together, calling that “a pretty weird” time, as he was more well-known than Jolie.
“We couldn’t go anywhere. I mean, we did, and then of course we had times when we would say things that became sound bites or whatever,” he continued.
In 2018, Thornton shared similar sentiments about his and Jolie’s split. During an appearance on the HFPA in Conversation podcast, he reiterated that he and the Maleficent actor only divorced because of their “different lifestyles.”
“Hers is a global lifestyle and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle,” he said at the time. “So, that's really—that's the only reason we're probably not still together, maybe, because of a different path in life we wanted to take.”
Before his relationship with Jolie, Thornton was married four times. He was married to Melissa Lee Gatlin from 1978 to 1980, and to Toni Lawrence from 1986 to 1988, followed by Cynda Williams from 1990 to 1992 and then Pietra Dawn Cherniak from 1993 to 1997. In 2014, over a decade after his divorce from Jolie, he married his sixth and current wife, Connie Angland.
He’s also the father of four children. He shares his 46-year-old daughter, Amanda, with Gatlin, and two adult children, William, 32, and Harry, 31, with Cherniak. Thornton and Angland also have a 21-year-old daughter, Bella.
Meanwhile, Jolie married ex-husband Brad Pitt in 2014. While they split in 2019, their divorce wasn’t finalized until December 2024. The exes have also been embroiled in a legal battle since 2022 over Jolie’s sale of her shares of their winery in France, Château Miraval, to alcohol company Stoli Group.
Pitt and Jolie share six children: Maddox, 23, Pax, 21, Zahara, 20, Shiloh, 19, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 16.
