The Truth About Angelina Jolie's Alleged Blood Vial

International movie star Angelina Jolie is a glamorous A-list actor and filmmaker with more than 60 acting credits to her name and one of the highest-paid women in Hollywood. She's an Academy Award-winner and three-time Golden Globe recipient. She's a mother to six children, three of them adopted, and an author. She's also a humanitarian, who has worked for the past 20 years with the United Nations, first as a goodwill ambassador, then as a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (via Biography). But Jolie had a dark side stretching back to her childhood that became much more public in her teenage years and early 20s.

In an interview in 2021 after her book, "Know Your Rights," was published, she talked about how she felt when she was young, saying she "didn't know how to focus her energy" and that she was "rudderless." "She experimented with drugs, including heroin, drank excessively and cut herself in an attempt to overcome an overwhelming sense of emptiness," the Guardian reported. During her first marriage to actor Johnny Lee Miller, Jolie wore a T-shirt with his name drawn on it in her blood. Even stranger, when she was married to her second husband, actor Billy Bob Thornton, they allegedly wore vials of each other's blood around their neck — except that's not quite accurate.

During a discussion with college students at Loyola Marymount University's School of Film & Television in 2014, Thornton answered a question about the supposed vials of blood, clarifying the endless rumor that has followed both of them around for two decades, even as they moved on from their marriage in 2003 and pursed other relationships.  

Thornton likened the vials to lockets, similar to the ones people wear containing photos of loved ones. He said they were apart for work so much that it was a gesture on her part to feel a little closer to him. "She thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razor blade and sliced our fingers, smeared a little blood on these lockets and you wear it around your neck just like you wear your son or daughter's baby hair in one. Same thing," Thornton said. Once the rumor started, he joked they were suddenly "wearing quarts of blood around our necks and we were vampires and lived in a dungeon" (via Vanity Fair).