Actress Megan Fox and singer Machine Gun Kelly have been one of the most talked about couples for their somewhat dark ways of showing affection. In 2021, the rapper uploaded a photo to his Instagram with a necklace with Fox’s blood. A Valentine’s Day gift that caused quite a stir. But this duo wasn’t the first celebrity couple to literally hang a small part of their partner around their neck. These were Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. The American actor turned 70 last August, and more than 40 in the acting world, and now he recalled one of the “best moments of his life” in an interview for Rolling Stone: when he and Jolie, to whom he was married for three years, wore necklaces with a drop of each other’s blood. An act that on previous occasions he had defined as “a gesture of adolescent love” and “a sign that we are strongly in love”.
The director and musician also has experience in marriage, because he has been married six different times, but he still fondly remembers his relationship with the actress: “Angelina and I had a wonderful time together. We remain very, very friends. And the breakup was very civil. We just separated because our lifestyles were very different,” he says in the interview.
Thornton and Jolie were married for three years, from 2000 to 2003. He, she now recalls, “was more famous” when they met in 1999 while filming out of controland when they started dating they received “a lot of media attention”. “For some reason, people and the media were very interested in celebrity couples; it seemed to be a very popular thing. So it was strange. We couldn’t go anywhere. Well, we hung out and, of course, sometimes we said things that made the news.” But one of the things that attracted the most attention was the necklace they both wore at public events: “Each had a small pendant with, literally, a drop of blood inside.” A saying that caused a lot of scandal and on which many theories have been hypothesized, which Thornton has now clarified: “It was a romantic idea and nothing more. But people said that we are vampires, we live in a prison, we drink each other’s blood and things like that.”
The one with the “romantic idea” was Jolie, as the actor said on a previous occasion. “One day Angie came home with a kit that I had bought. You know those clear lockets where you put a picture of your grandmother or something and wear them around your neck? Well, that’s all. I bought two. We spent a lot of time apart because she was in Cambodia filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Me too The monster ball. We were polar opposites: we saw each other every two weeks, more or less,” he said AND! News in 2014. “He thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razor blade, cut off our fingers, smeared some blood on these lockets and wore them around our necks, just like you would strands of your baby’s hair. Same thing. So we started wearing liter bottles of blood around our necks,” he joked. The actress also clarified on one occasion that “it was like a flower press, as if you made a little cut on your finger and pressed your fingerprint”, and expressed in an interview: “It was a very tender gesture. It seemed romantic to me!”
Thornton has never lost faith in love or marriage, after five failed attempts, he has been married to fellow actress Connie Angland for 12 years. They share a 21-year-old daughter who is also in the acting world. “I found the right place,” he says in the interview for Rolling Stone. “The other times I got married it was like, one night you drank a little too much and someone said, ‘We should get married.’ And you say, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I always tell people that at least I was trying.”
He was Angelina Jolie’s second husband, after being married to actor Jonny Lee Miller from 1996 to 1999. But her third marriage was the best known and one of the most appreciated: Brad Pitt. Although they confirmed their relationship in 2005, they only got married in 2014, a marriage that lasted just two years, since they announced their separation in 2016, starting a court battle that only ended last year, when they finally reached a divorce settlement. However, the Brangelinas have not made up: Pitt recently sued her for $35 million in damages over the sale of his share of Château Miraval, the place where they married and which still has them at odds in court.
