Angelina Jolie gave it her all for Maleficent—so much so that she terrified her six children!
"I loved being Maleficent. I was quite sad to put my staff down and put my horns away because somehow, she just lives in a different world," the 38-year-old actress says. "But I did have to take my staff home to practice walking with it in my cloak, and then I would go outside and scream at the bushes to expand my voice and play with my voice. So, mom was a bit nutso for a period."
What did the movie star's fiancé, Brad Pitt, think of her transformation into the Mistress of All Evil?
"I don't know! You know, I never asked him," Jolie tells Entertainment Weekly. "He thinks she's cool."
Three of the couple's children make cameos in the movie: Pax Jolie-Pitt, 10, Zahara Jolie-Pitt, 9, and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 5. The latter was cast as a young Princess Aurora, while her siblings were given lesser roles. "They're with their teachers," Jolie says of the elder children. "The idea of that day was the prince and princesses from around the world show up for the christening, so there will people of all races, all creeds. It was Pax and his teacher, who is Vietnamese, playing the Vietnamese Queen and Prince and then Zahara and her teacher playing the African or Nubian queen and princess. I love that christening scene so much and of course we've watched it at home [in the animated film] as a family. I had to walk by them being very mean. Of course, I wanted to stop and wink at them."
Makeup artist Rick Baker used prosthetics to achieve Maleficent's razor-sharp cheekbones; they were modeled after Lady Gaga's Born This Way period, per Jolie's suggestion. "We wanted to take away the things that were softer on my face," she explains. Jolie also wore several sets of horns in the movie.
"It was pretty funny, because I kept on hitting my horns on things," she says. "The framing was very strange...They were actually kind of heavy. There had to be [lighter weight] ones that you could ride horses in because if you fall with something [heavy] attached to your head, that's it—it could break your neck. There were softer horns for the fights. The harder ones were magnetic so I could actually clip them off and walk around, but then I looked like a little bear. It did not look half as cool."
Luckily, Jolie got the hang of it. "Because they were magnetic, I could take them off for lunch or I could just give my neck a break. When they weren't the magnetic ones, I did almost knock myself out quite a few time," she says. "It's not just that you're a foot taller on top, you're also in five-inch heels so you are really big. I was out of whack for a bit. Definitely, it took me a while to become graceful with her."