Billy Bob Thornton is clearing up the famous rumor that he and ex Angelina Jolie wore vials of each other’s blood on a necklace.
In an interview with Rolling Stone published on Monday, November 17, Thornton, 70, said the blood vial necklaces “never existed.”
“We each had a little locket, literally with a drop of blood in them. That’s a romantic little idea, and that’s all that was,” the Landman actor clarified.
“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,” Thornton added, referring to the media fascination with the former couple, who were wed from May 2000 to May 2003.
Looking back on their relationship, Thornton said that he and Jolie, 50, remain on great terms.
“Angelina and I had a great time together,” he 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.”
Thornton and Jolie were regular tabloid fixtures during their marriage, which the actor described as a “pretty weird” time.
“When we met, I was the more famous one. And then when we got together, for some reason, the people and the media are very interested in celebrity couples, that seems to be a very popular thing,” he explained. “So, it was weird. 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.”
Jolie has previously opened up about her divorce from Thornton, telling Vogue in 2004, “It took me by surprise, too, because overnight, we totally changed.”
“Because we’re actors, we go away for months at a time and you grow and change separately,” she said at the time. “I think one day we had just nothing in common. And it’s scary but … I think it can happen when you get involved and you don’t know yourself yet. It’s taken me a while to grow up, and I still think I’m not even close to it yet.”
Thornton has been married six times. He wed his current wife, Connie Angland, in October 2014 and the couple share a daughter, Bella, 21.
“Connie and I have been together 23 years and married for 12. Our daughter is 20. So, I found the right spot to be,” he told Rolling Stone.
The actor recently gushed about his daughter, noting that he and Angland are “helicopter parents, kind of, I guess.”
Bella is studying at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where her parents purchased a home.
“So we got a house up there. She’s 12 minutes from the campus,” Thornton said on the Thursday, November 13, episode of the Today show.
“That’s like helicopter parenting to the next level,” joked host Savannah Guthrie, to which the actor responded, “It is, yeah.”
As well as Bella, Thornton is dad to daughter Amanda, 46, whom he shares with his first wife, Melissa Lee Gatlin, and sons William, 32, and Harry, 31, with ex-wife Pietra Dawn Cherniak. Jolie, meanwhile, shares six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt.
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