By Kenneth Atisele
Want to turn Angelina Jolie into one of Santa’s perfect, little elves? Just make her wait on pins and needles during the holidays for a job she really wants.
‘I started wrapping everything – even little things that went in the stocking,’ Jolie tells Entertainment Weekly of how badly she wanted to direct the upcoming film ‘Unbroken’. ‘I couldn’t just sit there and wait for the phone. So I was like, ‘I’ll wrap this whistle! I’ll wrap this candy cane!’
39-year-old Jolie, who is featured on the cover of this week’s EW – which hits newsstands Tuesday – with her Unbroken star, Jack O’Connell, says she was so nervous waiting for the call from Universal last Christmas that even her husband, Brad Pitt, ‘couldn’t talk to her.’
‘I had to pitch really hard,’ she recalls of her meeting when she was up for the job, but wasn’t a shoo-in. ‘I was on fire. There was no stopping me. I was completely insane.’
Continues Jolie: ‘If anyone thought doing the movie was a bad idea, they knew better than to mention it to me.’
But it all worked out in the end, and when Jolie finally got the call, the first thing she did was introduce herself to real-life war hero, Louis Zamperini, the 97-year-old whose amazing life was the basis of Laura Hillenbrand’s book and a neighbour who just happened to live up the street from Jolie in Los Angeles.
‘I fell in love with this extraordinary man,’ she says.
