Angelina Jolie Sought Comfort While Filming Couture by Wearing Late Mom’s Necklace When She Felt ‘Vulnerable’

Angelina Jolie’s new film resonated with her like few projects have before. 

In writer-director Alice Winocour’s movie Couture, which premiered Sunday, Sept. 7, at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Oscar winner plays a mother and filmmaker who’s working on a Paris Fashion Week runway film while getting divorced and learning of a breast cancer diagnosis.

“I felt very vulnerable,” Jolie, 50, said of making the French- and English-language movie during an interview with Variety at the festival.

The star, who underwent a preventive double mastectomy in 2013 because she carried the BRCA1 gene, couldn’t help but think of her family history. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007, and her aunt and grandmother also died of the disease.

Jolie sought comfort by wearing one of her late mother’s necklaces onscreen in Couture, she told the outlet. 

“I feel like it’s such a personal film,” the mother of six said. “It felt so private that in my mind, it’s probably the one film that doesn’t feel like a film.”

Couture follows Jolie’s Maxine Walker and two others: makeup artist and aspiring writer Angèle (played by Ella Rumpf) and South Sudan model Ada (Anyier Anei). Winocour said that she had Jolie in mind when writing its screenplay.

“I thought it would be interesting to show her fragility and the woman behind the icon,” the director said. “What I love about Angelina is that she’s in the Hollywood system, but at the same time, she’s a kind of a rebel, a rebel to the authority.”

Jolie knew signing on to the film would “bring up many personal things,” she told Variety. “But I have always found the heaviest films tend to have the most loving sets. There’s something quite comforting about having real conversations and having real feelings with a shared community. It was quite healing in many ways because you look at the other faces of the people on the set, because one in three people have cancer, and most everybody’s been in a hospital room with somebody they’ve loved. Everybody on set has lost someone they’ve loved.”

She continued, “You recognize that life is fragile and time goes quickly, and people pass away that we can’t imagine the world could exist without… It’s hard not to feel very close to a crew and other actors in this kind of a piece.”

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At a Q&A after Couture’s Sept. 7 premiere screening, Jolie got emotional while giving a message of hope for those facing cancer. “One thing I remember my mother saying when she had cancer, she said to me once, we had had a dinner and people were asking her how she was feeling and she said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer.’

“So I would say, if you know someone who is going through something, ask them about everything else in their life as well, you know? They’re a whole person and they’re still living,” she concluded.

Couture does not yet have a release date. Among Jolie’s other upcoming credits are Anxious People, Maude v Maude and Maleficent 3.