Angelina Jolie has six children with her husband, Brad Pitt, and it’s hard to imagine the actress without her brood of biological and adopted children. In a new interview, she admitted she didn’t see herself having children until a trip to Cambodia changed her life forever.
Jolie is currently filming First They Killed My Father in Cambodia, where she adopted her 14-year-old son Maddox in 2002. She said her first visit, while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, changed her outlook on life.
"When I first came to Cambodia, it changed me. It changed my perspective," she told the AP. "I realized there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it."
She went on to say before the trip, she never saw herself being a mother. She’s now mom to Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, and twins Vivienne and Knox. Brad Pitt has said he wanted "a dozen" kids with Jolie, but they "crapped out" at six.
"It's strange, I never wanted to have a baby,” she said. “I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother.”
However, after spending time with kids at a school in Cambodia, something clicked. “It was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere,” she said.
Jolie referred to First They Killed My Father - based on a memoir from Cambodian genocide survivor Loung Ung - as the “most important” film of her career so far, and she also talked about how content she is in life overall.
“For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I'm finally where I should be," she said.