Angelina Jolie is finally speaking up on her role as collateral damage in the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
After leaked emails revealed a brutal exchange about the actress from executives Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin — in which they bashed the star and a Cleopatra film she was attempting to make — the actress and director said her initial reaction was sympathetic.
“There are certain things that bother me and certain things that don’t. Personal attacks on me? I think I’m just so used to it,” Jolie said in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times published Wednesday.
“Honestly, my first instinct was that I was worried about Amy. I had someone call her and ask if she was O.K. Not because I’m a saint, but because I think we have to look at the bigger picture. She’s got kids. I knew it was going to unravel for her,” she said.
She offers no clues as to what bothers her from the correspondence, but the email exchange about her is packed with incendiary language.
“I’m not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat who thought nothing of shoving this off her plate for eighteen months so she could go direct a movie,” Rudin wrote to Pascal, presumably of Jolie forgoing the Cleopatra project to direct last year’s war drama “Unbroken.”
“She’s a camp event and a celebrity and that’s all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming. We will end up being the laughing stock of our industry and we will deserve it, which is so clearly where this is headed that I cannot believe we are still wasting our time with it,” he said.
Jolie’s latest directorial effort “By the Sea,” in which she stars with Pitt, will open the AFI Festival on Thursday and see limited release on November 13.