Angelina Jolie: 'My Fighting Spirit Is Finally Back'

Promoting her new film Couture, Angelina Jolie told Variety her children helped her reclaim her drive after a difficult period.

A Renewed Sense of Purpose

Angelina Jolie says she is feeling like herself again, and she is giving the credit to the six people who know her best. Speaking with Variety while promoting her new film "Couture," the actor and filmmaker described emerging from a bruising stretch with a recovered sense of drive. "My fighting spirit is finally back," she told the outlet. "I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it's coming back in large part thanks to my children."

That support, she explained, has shifted as her kids have grown. With most of them now around 18, Jolie said the dynamic has reversed: the children who once needed her are now the ones nudging her back into the world. "Now they want to see me traveling the world," she said, "they want me to get out and do things." It is a candid admission from a performer who has spent two decades balancing an enormous career against an equally public family life.

Inside 'Couture'

The film that occasioned the conversation is among the most personal of Jolie's career. Written and directed by Alice Winocour and arriving in theaters June 26, "Couture" casts Jolie as Maxine, a director of low-budget horror movies whose life is pulling in several directions at once. She is taking on a commission from a French luxury fashion house, navigating single motherhood and working through a divorce when a breast cancer diagnosis upends everything.

Variety reports that Winocour wrote the part specifically for Jolie and set the story against the glittering, high-pressure backdrop of Paris Fashion Week, using that world to explore themes of female solidarity and survival. The ensemble also includes Ella Rumpf and Anyier Anei.

Director: Alice Winocour, who tailored the role to Jolie
Premise: a horror filmmaker confronts a cancer diagnosis amid a divorce
Co-stars: Ella Rumpf and Anyier Anei
In theaters: June 26

On Acting, Directing and Mortality

The interview also found Jolie reflecting on a deliberate step back from performing. "I had kind of quit acting before my divorce. I was focusing on directing," she told Variety, underscoring how much of her recent energy has gone behind the camera rather than in front of it. That makes a role as raw as Maxine feel like a pointed re-entry into acting on her own terms.

She was strikingly frank about mortality, too. "We're all going to die, we're all not here forever," she said, adding, "I have never lived feeling like I'm going to have a long life." Coming from an artist whose character is grappling with illness on screen, the remarks blur the line between performer and part.

A New Chapter

Taken together, the conversation sketches a portrait of an artist re-engaging with her craft, buoyed by a family that has become increasingly independent. "Couture" stands as one of Jolie's most intimate screen roles in years, folding motherhood, illness and creative ambition into a single character. For audiences who have followed her from action blockbusters to acclaimed directing work, the film, and the renewed appetite for work and travel she describes, suggests a star ready to move forward after a difficult passage.