In 2017, Jolie broke her silence to tell Vanity Fair how she was handling the split. “I’ve been trying for nine months to be really good at just being a homemaker and picking up dog poop and cleaning dishes and reading bedtime stories. And I’m getting better at all three,” she said in a cover story, adding that this had been “the hardest time” for her family. At the same time, said Jolie, she and Pitt were both trying to navigate the aftermath in a healthy way.“We care for each other and care about our family, and we are both working towards the same goal,” she said.
When the couple finally reached a legal settlement late last year, James Simon, the actress’s lawyer, spoke to People magazine about the toll that the battle had taken on his client.
“More than eight years ago, Angelina filed for divorce from Mr. Pitt,” he said. “She and the children left all of the properties they had shared with Mr. Pitt, and since that time she has focused on finding peace and healing for their family. This is just one part of a long ongoing process that started eight years ago. Frankly, Angelina is exhausted, but she is relieved this one part is over.”Pitt, meanwhile, declined to comment until now, perhaps because he’s spent decades under a media microscope. “My personal life is always in the news,” he told GQ. “It’s been in the news for 30 years, bro. Or some version of my personal life, let’s put it that way.”
And Pitt has not enjoyed that. “It’s been an annoyance I’ve had to always deal with in different degrees, large and small, as I do the things I really want to do,” he continued. “So it’s always been this kind of nagging time suck or waste of time, if you let it be that, I don’t know. I don’t know. Mostly I feel pretty…. My life is fairly contained. It feels pretty warm and secure with my friends, with my loves, with my fam, with my knowledge of who I am, that, you know, it’s like this fly buzzing around a little bit.”