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The responsibility of raising a veritable petting zoo of exotic children would be burdensome for any parents, but to do so while toplining four or five studio pictures per year is just thankless. Especially when those movies are fraught with the kind of violence and distress saturating the work of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the latter of whom walks us through the delicate duty of parsing real brutality and war from the pop-culture pugilism of Mommy and Daddy's films:
"We don't take war and violence lightly, but we don't hide it from anybody," the actress tells British Harper's Bazaar for its December issue. "Listen, my kids play video games. I let them play with toy soldiers."
Jolie, 33, says she believes in an honest approach with her children and wants them to be aware that violence exists. She also wants them to differentiate between the gun-wielding characters she plays in movies and real-life violent acts.
"We say, 'Mommy and Daddy have movies where we play these characters, but there's real death and real violence in the world,'" says Jolie, who has six kids with Brad Pitt. "There's a real responsibility there to create in their minds the difference between the two."
Thankfully, like so many of Hollywood's privileged youngesters, Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh and their blobby twin siblings Knox and Vivienne have all the lessons they need within a child-size arm's length: Mommy bending bullets through Slavic killers skulls? Not real. Mommy screaming in the bedroom for the last four months? Real. Daddy pummeling opponents to a pulp in Fight Club? Not real. Bleeding paparazzi killing each other for one last snapshot of the family? Real. Mommy and Daddy's gunplay in Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Not real. Mommy cursing Grandpa out of the house after his semi-annual visitations? Ugh. How do they make it look so easy?
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