Angelina Jolie Hints at How Much Her Brad Pitt Divorce Affected All Aspects of Her Life

Angelina Jolie seems to be everywhere these days because she’s campaigning for an Oscar nomination. Her dazzling work as legendary opera singer Maria Callas in the biopic, Maria, has critics and fans raving about her work, but it’s been a long road back to Hollywood after her divorce from Brad Pitt.

The 49-year-old actress hinted to Vanity Fair how her 2016 split from Pitt and how it impacted all aspects of her life. “I wasn’t myself for a while, so I wasn’t able to give as much to my work for a few years,” she admitted. It was working on Maria that “was the beginning of starting to come alive again.” While Jolie doesn’t go into details, she does lightly touch on how she felt in those years battling her ex in court. 

“I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn’t have a lot of light and life within me. Your light’s dim,” she continued. “I also just needed to be home more, so I couldn’t commit large periods of time to pieces. The choice of what to work on and when was not a creative choice, often, the last few years, but sometimes the practical choice.”

Not only did her split from Pitt affect her career, but she also made specific choices about her personal life. “There’s a reason Angelina is still single, and it’s not for a lack of men lining up to date her,” an InTouch Weekly source claimed in late October. “Fact is, she keeps them all at a distance because she’s so terrified of getting hurt again the way she did with Brad.” 

Jolie and Pitt broke up eight years ago after she accused him of domestic violence while on a private flight home to Los Angeles with their six kids. The court documents chronicle a traumatic experience from her perspective, but Pitt was never charged in the incident. He has since moved into a serious relationship with 31-year-old jewelry executive Ines de Ramon, but Jolie and Wolfs star are still fighting over their winery, Château Miraval, in court. 

Her Callas role has allowed her to open herself up again to new opportunities and she’s grateful for how it changed her life. “All of us, we really don’t realize where things land in our body over a lifetime of different experiences and where we hold it to protect ourselves,” Jolie said in a recent interview. “We hold it in our stomachs. We hold it in our chest. We breathe from a different place when we’re nervous or we’re sad,” she told the Associated Press in November. “The first few weeks were the hardest because my body had to open, and I had to breathe again. And that was a discovery of how much I wasn’t.”

Jolie has been reborn.

Before you go, click here to see the longest celebrity divorces that took years to get finalized.