David Duchovny wants partial credit for Angelina Jolie’s career trajectory.
“I feel like I discovered Angelina Jolie,” Duchovny, 63, told Andy Cohen during a Thursday, June 27, appearance on his Radio Andy show on SiriusXM. “I was part of casting [Playing God] — I didn’t discover her — and she came in. I just knew she was a movie star.”
He added, “I told everybody, ‘You’ve gotta cast her!’”
Duchovny starred in the 1997 thriller as Dr. Eugene Sands, a surgeon who loses his medical license for the negligent death of a patient suffering from addiction and soon finds himself working as a drug dealer. Jolie, 49, portrayed Claire, the girlfriend of Eugene’s mobster boss.
“[Playing God] was very rock ’n’ roll and fun and loud and say-what-you-want-to-say, dress wild and love wild — you know that fantasy,” Jolie later recalled of the film in a November 2021 profile for Interview Magazine. “I really allowed myself to get into that world. Being the age I am, I sometimes feel like a punk kid walking onto certain sets, but I didn’t this time. I felt very much [like] a woman.”
Jolie, the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, further detailed life as a young performer “starting out in [the] business.”
“As a young woman, there are parts I’ll look at that may not be in the best projects, but I’m starting out in this business and trying to figure out how I can make it work,” she recalled. “I’m having to do a lot to keep my clothes on and not be cast in girlfriend roles. Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are roles you get offered that are vulgar and violent — just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.”
Jolie has since gone on to star in films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Maleficent, Salt and Marvel’s The Eternals. In 2000, she won her first Oscar for her role in Girl, Interrupted. Most recently, Jolie was part of the team behind The Outsiders, which won Best Musical at the Tony Awards earlier this month. (Jolie co-produced the project with 15-year-old daughter Vivienne, whom she shares with ex-husband Brad Pitt.)
“S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders in high school, half a century later, it still speaks to us. Society changes but the experience of being an outsider is universal,” Jolie said during the awards ceremony on June 16. “To any young person [and] any person feeling on the outside, you are not wrong to see what’s unfair.”
She continued, “You are not wrong to wish to find their own path and as the cast raises their voices, I hope it inspires many of you watching to value yours.”
