Angelina Jolie: 'I'm Boring'

July 25, 2003 -- The entire planet might be talking about Angelina Jolie's sex life, but she still finds herself quite "boring."

Although she's long had a reputation for shocking the public, Jolie caused even more eyebrows to raise two weeks ago when, in a 20/20 interview with ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters, she revealed she had had a lesbian affair and found being slashed with knives sexy.

Now, as she promotes Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, she's a little surprised that the public is so interested in digging deep into her past. These days, she describes herself as a busy working mom who doesn't have much time for dating.

"I'm a person who hasn't had a relationship in a very long time, and hasn't had sex for over a year," Jolie told reporters in New York, where she was promoting the new film, which opens today in theaters around the country.

"I find my personal life really boring," she said.

Hoping for Another Sequel

On screen, Croft is a female Indiana Jones. The original film grossed $131 million in the United States, and made her one of the biggest action stars in Hollywood. This time out, the intrepid British archaeologist stumbles onto Pandora's box in Africa and tangles with a bioterrorist who thinks he can use it for evil.

In person, the 28-year-old actress hardly looks the part of the butt-kicking action hero, revealing thin arms through a black sleeveless top, sipping Diet Coke in cargo pants and talking about two issues dear to her heart — motherhood and refugee children.

Jolie was obliging to talk about fallout from the 20/20 interview. But you could tell she wanted to move on. In recent days, she reportedly cut short a TV interview with Good Day Live because she wanted to talk about the film rather than her sex life.

Lara Croft is a far cry from her Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted. Still, Jolie says she's hoping that she'll get to put her English accent to use in sequel after sequel. She especially loves when her character is called the female James Bond.

"She's an adventurer," said Jolie. "She fights for what she believes in. She loves other countries and other cultures, she's open and fun. She's a good guy."

Whenever a star steps forward with personal revelations so close to a movie premiere, one must question whether that's all part of a public relations strategy. But for Jolie, the public attention has been a nonstop carnival of outrageous behavior, family controversies and tattoos.

Her two-year marriage to Billy Bob Thornton ended last year. Once known as the most outlandish couple in show business, they had sported tattoos of each other's names, wore pendants containing samples of each other's blood and wore each other's underwear. Now, the former couple is barely speaking to each other.

Jolie is also estranged from her father, actor Jon Voight, who had gone on TV asking that she seek mental help.

‘What Nourishes Me Also Destroys Me’

Her focus now is Maddox, the 2 ½-year-old Cambodian boy she and Thornton adopted shortly before the divorce. But her past was very much on her mind when she sat down with Walters and spoke of morbid feelings in childhood, when she wanted to be a mortician and enjoyed dangerous sex. She said of one encounter:

"I got knives out and had a night where we attacked each other … it felt so primitive and it felt so honest … and then I had to deal with, you know, not telling my mother, hiding things, wearing gauze bandages to high school."

Jolie said she no longer engages in such behavior, but she would be open to another lesbian relationship, having disclosed a relationship with model Jenny Shimizu.

After Thornton, however, she thinks her chances of remarrying are slim. Rather, she plans on being a single mom and keeping a lower profile.

"I so much want to live a normal life in a healthy state of mind, so I try not to think of myself as somebody in the press," she said. "That's the only way I can deal with it — just not to read those kinds of papers and magazines, and just keep living my life and hoping that somehow the press will be kind enough or responsible enough to tell the whole story so that at the end of the day it will make sense."

Currently, she and Maddox are in Montreal, where she's shooting the thriller Taking Lives. "Normally," she says, "Maddox and I travel everywhere alone."

In what she called a cleansing ritual this spring, Jolie had laser surgery to remove a tattoo bearing Billy Bob's name from her arm. She still has 10 other tattoos, including one on her stomach bearing Latin phrase Quod me nutrit me destruit — "What nourishes me also destroys me."