Angelina Jolie - The Biography. Rhona Mercer
the attraction between the co-stars was evident. And Jolie, who had been celibate since she’d split up with her punk boyfriend three years previously, was more than ready to let a new man into her life. She said of meeting Jonny, ‘We met while filming Hackers and I always fall in love while I’m working on a film. It’s such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It’s like discovering you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deep.’
Little did Jolie know how relevant this statement would become in terms of her future relationships.
The young cast of Hackers spent many weeks together preparing for the film, learning about computers (although Miller admitted that, out of ten, he’d give himself ‘about a quarter’ in terms of computer literacy, even by the end of filming) and it was this quality time that allowed the two young leads to fall in love.
‘We had three weeks of learning how to type and rollerblade,’ says Jolie, ‘and hanging out with the cast, which was heaven – racing Jonny on rollerblades was a big part of our relationship. We read a lot about computers and met computer hackers. With a lot of lines, I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it was fascinating.’
Born in middle-class Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, in 1972, Jonny found filming in New York (the location for the movie) something of an eye opener. He described the experience as ‘brilliant. Filming at three in the morning under Brooklyn Bridge – it’s stuff that you don’t get to do if you’re from Kingston.’ He also joked that it wasn’t much of a stretch playing Angelina’s love interest saying, ‘Yeah, it was terrible. You really have to suspend your disbelief!’
Much as it had been with Angelina, acting was in Jonny’s blood and by the age of seven he knew he wanted his future to be in films. His great-grandfather, Edmund James Lee, was a music-hall performer; his grandfather, Bernard Lee, played M in the first dozen Bond films; and his father, Alan Miller, was a stage actor and, later, a stage manager, so the young Jonny certainly had plenty of people to go to for acting tips. While he was at Tiffin School for Boys, Miller attended drama classes at the National Youth Music Theatre and, as soon as he’d completed his GCSEs, at the age of seventeen, he left school to pursue a stage career.
Miller was twenty-two when he landed the role in Hackers and he’d never met anyone quite like Angelina before. He was bowled over by both her beauty and her talent: ‘She’s smart. She’s resisted the usual stuff that a beautiful young actress would get… I think she’ll rocket. I bloody hope so – she deserves it.’
Although the two actors were quite opposite in nature – she was outspoken and bolshy, he was shy and introverted – the seed of love had been sown and the couple eloped to Los Angeles in March 1996, six months after Hackers was released. This isn’t to say that Jonny had an easy time seducing Angelina. He has since admitted that he ‘chased [Angelina] all over the world. I chased her all over North America until she succumbed. It took a while – a good few thousand miles.’
He also had to deal with the fact that, after falling in love with her on the set of Hackers, Angelina told him that caring about someone so deeply made her sad and that after filming was finished he should forget about her. This was easier said than done, though, and an unperturbed Jonny continued to keep in touch in spite of her trying to push him away.
Next, Jolie went on to make Mojave Moon, a road movie. She played a girl named Ellie who hitches a ride from an older man, Al McCord (played by Danny Aiello), back to where her mother Julie (Anne Archer) lives in the Mojave Desert. Jolie put in a good performance as the lovestruck Ellie, who falls for Al over the course of the road trip, but the film was – again – instantly forgettable and didn’t exactly set the world on fire. She made two more fairly low-key films, before going on to make Foxfire, on which she would yet again fall for one of her co-stars. In the thriller Without Evidence, she plays a junkie, Jodie Swearingen, and in Love is All There Is she takes on the role of the romantic lead, Gina Malacici, in a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet. In terms of impact, at least on a personal level, Foxfire was the next most significant film Jolie made. Although she and Jonny continued to speak to each other, they weren’t ‘committed’ in the relationship sense, which was probably just as well given that Jolie went on to fall in love with someone else. And this time, it was a woman.
Foxfire told the tale of five teenage girls who formed an unlikely bond after beating up a teacher who had sexually harassed them. In the same way that she bonded with Jonny on the set of Hackers, Angelina became very close to Jenny Shimizu, the Japanese-American model turned actress who is most famous for appearing in the Calvin Klein CK One adverts. Angelina said of meeting Jenny, ‘I fell in love with her the first second I saw her. I wanted to kiss and touch her. I noticed her sweater and the way her pants fitted and I thought, “My God!” I was getting incredibly strong sexual feelings. I realised I was looking at her in a way I look at men. It never crossed my mind that one day I was going to experiment with a woman. I just happened to fall for a girl.’
Jenny was similarly taken with Angelina and described their courtship as being more emotional than sexual in the early stages. ‘During breaks in filming Foxfire, I got to sit down with this person [Angelina] and spend two weeks with them, meeting them and talking with them before anything got sexual. I actually felt like I was caring for someone more than simply just having sex. And I didn’t feel like there was a straight girl that I was just bedding and she was going to freak out the next morning. We had established such a nice relationship that I felt this girl would have me back, no matter what. I knew this person would be loyal and wonderful to me.’
The girls didn’t just hang out on set, but spent a lot of time together after filming was finished. ‘We used to visit strip clubs,’ says Jenny, ‘and there was this tension. After the second week of filming, we kissed. She is beautiful. Her mouth is amazing. I’ve never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angelina. It’s like two water beds – it’s like this big kind of warm, mushy, beautiful thing. She’s a gorgeous woman.’
The only fly in Jenny and Angelina’s ointment was the presence of Jonny in Jolie’s life, and, although men often fantasise about lesbian sex, the reality was that Angelina’s new relationship didn’t turn him on one bit. Jenny said of the love triangle, ‘We were already sleeping together when I met Jonny while on Foxfire. She told both of us how she felt and we all went out to dinner one night. She was honest – that’s how she’s been her whole life.’
As an openly sexual person and someone who isn’t scared to push boundaries, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Angelina had suggested her two lovers get together and indulged in a threesome, but according to Jenny this was never on the cards. ‘We didn’t have a threesome,’ she said. ‘I’m not really into that – it was a friendship the three of us had. But there wasn’t much conversation with Jonny. I think he was very threatened by me.’
And who can blame him? The man was desperately in love and, having chased her halfway round the world, he wanted some commitment from Jolie – not to hear that she was in love with a woman. Jenny’s gut instinct was right and Jonny has since admitted that jealousy in a relationship is one of his least desirable traits. ‘I’ve learned that jealousy is to be avoided at all costs. I’m a really horribly jealous person, but I’ve calmed down now,’ he said after his divorce from Jolie.
By this time, Angelina had established quite a reputation as an S&M queen and Jenny didn’t escape Jolie’s fascination with knives. ‘It’s not so much we were dressed in leather capes and masks and there were chains. It was emotional. I would restrain her with my arms but we didn’t get into buying stuff. We just used whatever props were available if we wanted to. She was a collector of knives and taught me about them.’ Jenny also described Angelina as ‘a very dominant personality. Once she displays love for you, she wants to know how much you care about her.’
Although Jolie says that her attraction to Jenny took her by surprise, prior to meeting Jenny she had admitted that her modelling days had helped her to see women in a sexual light. ‘I did some modelling years ago and shared a cabin with one woman. I was in my black pants