Obviously, Brad Pitt understands the virtues of a nice, warm bath.
"I don't know how he does it, but…I talk a lot in the bath," Angelina Jolie says in the July issue of Marie Claire. "It's easier to talk when you're naked…Get naked with me, and I'll talk!"
While Jolie was presumably fully clothed during this interview, and during another she gave for next month's Esquire, that circumstance did not prevent the Oscar winner and mother of four from baring her thoughts on Brad, her babies, her career, the crazy world we're living in and the self-proclaimed crazy things she's doing to make it a better place.
"Brad's more—well, he doesn't get angry with me. He just gets concerned," Jolie tells Esquire, referring to her habit of exploring the property she bought in Cambodia, where she adopted five-year-old son Maddox in 2002, that needed demining before they could live on it. "He's much more—well, maybe he's smarter about it. The attitude being, 'Let's not just be walking around here, let's be cautious in a healthy way.'
"I'm brave to the point of stupidity sometimes. He's asking if the property can be demined again."
But contrary to popular belief (or tabloid headlines), she does not lead two lives.
"I have the great good fortune of being able to have a fun job," Jolie told the men's magazine. "It's a job that allows me to travel and that allows me, sometimes, to get out of myself…I try to make sure that my relationship with the man in my life is solid and complete and we're very connected and having a great life together and enjoying our children and being part of the world.
"So that's my life. It's not split in half. It's not one side taking over the other."
And, apparently, you can toss those breakup rumors out the window, as well.
After spending as much time facing down gossip that she's a home wrecker, a bad mom, a weird mom or a fair-weather do-gooder as she has basking in the glow of her success, Jolie says that she and Pitt have reached their comfort zone.
"I think we both went on a lot of faith—we really did," she told Marie Claire. "Our family has grown very quickly, and we have a lot of responsibility together, and we acknowledge that we are lucky we turned out to be for each other everything we'd hoped. We could have been very wrong, but every challenge we hit has brought us closer. It has been that kind of relationship."
To Esquire: "The phone rings every day. I say, 'No, of course it's not true,' and hang up. We joke about it, because it's usually when Brad and I are running after the kids and changing diapers. The fact is, we don’t do anything. We hardly ever leave the house. We try to schedule time when we're alone…Brad and I are starting with the children and are planning to have our time together in our later years."
The 32-year-old star of the upcoming Daniel Pearl biopic, A Mighty Heart, in which she plays the slain Wall Street Journalist reporter's widow, Mariane, also said that work—despite the fact that she says she doesn't want to be remembered as an actress after she dies—is a great outlet for dealing with life's problems.
It was Mariane Pearl who suggested that Jolie, whom she had previously bonded with over their interest in Buddhism and motherhood, play her in the big-screen adaptation of her memoir.
The actress-activist read the book and has since become very close with Pearl (her first friendship with a journalist, she told the Los Angeles Times last month), whose husband was beheaded by terrorists while he was on assignment in Pakistan.
"Focusing on that story on a daily basis, you certainly don't worry about your life," Jolie told Marie Claire. "I mean, there isn't a better film to make you hyperaware that you should complain about nothing."
A Mighty Heart premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21 and opens in U.S. theaters June 22.
Meanwhile, Jolie told reporters in Cannes that as soon as she's done shooting the thriller Wanted in Prague, she's planning to take a year off to spend with her family, which in addition to Pitt and Maddox also includes three-year-old Pax Thien, two-year-old Zahara, and the couple's biological daughter Shiloh, who just turned one on May 27.
"That's my job and I'm really happy to have it," she told Esquire. "But when I die, do I want to be remembered as an actress? No. I recently had an op-ed published in a newspaper. And at the end, it didn't say I was an actress. It said that I was a UN goodwill ambassador—that's all.
"I said, 'Hey, Brad, I'm not just an actress anymore.' "