Unlike virtually every other woman in the world, Angelina Jolie wasn't trying to hook up with Brad Pitt when they first met. It just happened.
In her first in-depth interview in two years and, more significantly, her first since causing a media sensation by coupling up with her eventual baby daddy, Jolie tells Vogue she never intended to split up Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and that she'd gladly welcome a sit-down with the former Friend.
Though the feeling may not be entirely mutual.
In the cover story of the January issue, appearing on newsstands Friday, Jolie says she was "quite content to be a single mom" when she was cast opposite Pitt in Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
"Brad was a huge surprise to me," she says of their 2003 meeting during preproduction on what would become the blockbuster spy picture. "I, like most people, had a very distant impression of him...from the media. I think we were the last two people who were looking for a relationship."
And not just because one of them already had one.
"I didn't know much exactly about where Brad was in his personal life. But it was clear he was with his best friend, someone he loves and respects. And so we were both living, I suppose, very full lives."
The 31-year-old Oscar winner says she realized her attraction to Pitt when she couldn't wait to show up at work every day, saying their coupling developed from a "strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened."
While Jolie says she and Pitt were "kind of a pair" during the 2004 shoot, she didn't address tabloid reports that the twosome were engaging in various extracurricular activities while Pitt was still married to Aniston. She did say, however, that she and Pitt remained "very, very good friends" after production on their film wrapped.
"It took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realize that it might mean something more than we'd earlier allowed ourselves to believe," she says of her relationship with the Hollywood heartthrob. "And both knowing that the reality of that was a big thing, something that was going to take a lot of serious consideration."
Headlines aside, Jolie tells Vogue that the salad days of her coupling with Pitt were "not as exciting as what a lot of people would like to believe," adding that they were spent mostly "contemplating and thinking and talking" about what they both wanted out of life.
"And then life developed in a way where we could be together," she continues, "where it felt like something we would do, we should do."
To prove once and for all that the newly crowned first couple of Hollywood was not an intentional pairing, Jolie says she would be more than happy to have a woman-to-woman with Aniston.
"I did [once meet Aniston], but it was not a proper meeting," she tells the magazine, though failing to note whether the face-to-face took place before or after the former TV star's divorce from Pitt in January 2005. "We've, like, passed each other and said 'hi' briefly, shook hands. But not a real sit-down-and-talk kind of meeting. That would be her decision, and I would welcome it."
As for her and Pitt's burgeoning family, Jolie credits Maddox with solidifying the couple's relationship, saying that while the brood was hanging out, her now five-year-old son "just out of the blue called him Dad."
"It was amazing. We were playing with cars on the floor of a hotel room, and we both heard it and didn't say anything and just looked at each other," she says. "So, that was probably the most defining moment, when he decided that we would all be a family."
It's also the family, Jolie says, that she and Pitt are committed to, even more so than each other.
"We both have been married before, so it's not marriage that's necessarily kept some people together," the Good Shepherd star adds. "We are legally bound to our children, not to each other, and I think that's the most important thing."
So, fans can stop waiting for that wedding announcement.
During the interview, Jolie also cops to not having spoken to her father, Jon Voight, in five years, though she does keep in contact with her mother, French actress Marcheline Bertrand—and a few others.
"I don't trust anyone. I don't think it's a good thing...I'd like to say I trust my mother, but I also don't know if she might do something that she thinks is in my best interest.
"I trust Brad will never do anything," she continues. Though on second thought..."I don't know. I don't trust anybody completely."