Angelina Jolie breaks silence over backlash: ‘I am upset’

ANGELINA Jolie’s tell-all interview with Vanity Fair opened her up to a firestorm of criticism. Now the actress and humanitarian says she’s upset her words were twisted.

ANGELINA Jolie has addressed the fierce backlash that faced her tell-all Vanity Fair interview last week, saying that she’s “upset” her statements were misinterpreted.

Jolie’s Vanity Fair cover story saw the 42-year-old discuss the breakdown of her marriage to fellow actor Brad Pitt in devastating detail, as the star revealed she now cries in the shower to hide her pain from her children.

But it was an anecdote about the casting process for her latest film that left readers and those on social media shocked.

Jolie described the tactics used to find the young lead for her upcoming First They Killed My Father, about the Khmer Rouge-led genocide.

Casting directors went to circuses, orphanages and slum schools and put money on a table in front of groups of little girls, Vanity Fair reported. The girls were told to look at the cash, think of a reason why they needed it and then snatch it. The director would then catch the child and force them to give the money back.

Angelina Jolie tells @VanityFair how she found her Khmer Rouge film lead by tempting deprived kids with cash and then snatching it away... pic.twitter.com/ufNKS4GOjb

— Kay Burley (@KayBurley) July 27, 2017

As Jolie told it to Vanity Fair, the girl they eventually chose was the one who had the most emotional response to the situation.

“When she was asked later what the money was for, she said her grandfather had died, and they didn’t have enough money for a nice funeral,” she said.

Many high profile social media users slammed the unorthodox casting process, describing Jolie as “appalling” and “crazy” for recounting the story so breezily.

In a statement released to Huffington Post, the actor and humanitarian said the “pretend exercise” had been misrepresented in the media.

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario,” she said. “The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened.”

Huffington Post reports that children who auditioned were also aware they were improvising a scene from a film, and that no real money was involved.