Why Angelina Jolie chose to go barefoot on The Tonight Show
Angelina Jolie showed up to The Tonight Show without wearing any shoes.
The actor made her first talk show appearance in a decade as she spoke to Jimmy Fallon on Thursday (December 5) about her role as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s film, Maria. As she walked across the stage to take her seat, Fallon pointed out one aspect of her wardrobe.
“I noticed that you’re barefoot,” he told her. “Did you forget your shoes?”
The Oscar winner then explained: “No, I broke my toe yesterday, and I tried to find a comfortable shoe, but I just decided to not.”
As Jolie sat down and began the interview, she addressed how long it had been since she last did a public television interview. “By the way, I get very nervous on talk shows,” she said. “I get very uncomfortable, and I haven’t done one for, like, a decade. This is so not my thing.”
During her discussion with Fallon, she opened up about her children and whether or not they would end up in the entertainment industry themselves.
“I think some of them [want to work] off-camera, behind the scenes, but they really, really want to be — especially Shiloh — they want to be private,” she said about Maddox, 23, Pax, 21, Zahara, 19, Shiloh, 18, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 16, all of whom she shares with her ex-husband Brad Pitt.
“Just private, not photographed, not on the thing. I think, her most of all, would like privacy.”
“It just must get so tricky, because everyone’s famous,” the talk show host responded.
“But it wasn’t their choice,” Jolie said. “So some people are more comfortable with public, some people are more comfortable with talk shows.”
At another point in the interview, Fallon asked about reports about her unlikely back-up career. “Is it true that prior to acting you were studying to become a funeral director?” he asked.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Doesn’t it make sense though?”
“My grandfather died, and I remember thinking this is not how they should be,” she explained. “This should be a celebration of life. And since I’m not afraid of death and I was comfortable with it, I thought, ‘This would be a great career path for me. ... I could, like, make this better. I could do a thing here.’”
“We need more people like that,” Fallon told her after she shared the story.
Jolie joked she still considers being a funeral director as her “fallback career” to this day.
The actor previously addressed her aspirations to be a funeral director during a 2021 interview with 60 Minutes. “It sounds like this very strange, eccentric, dark thing to do,” she said.
“If this acting thing didn’t work out, that was gonna be my backup.”
