Tuesday, July 23, 2024



Jon had invited the reporter and photographer upstairs where photos (plural) of "Jolie and her ex-husband Brad Pitt are prominently displayed." The info was then given to People by Brad's PR for another post. The drumroll is hard to miss.







By Stephen Rodrick

(excerpts)

His antics have a manic “Let’s put on a show” quality to them, not unlike the comedy stylings of Sid Caesar, one of Voight’s boyhood heroes. Today, Voight doesn’t resemble any of the troubled men tortured by circumstances he’s played in his six-decade career, including would-be hustler Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy,” paralyzed Vietnam vet Luke Martin in “Coming Home,” and Ed Gentry, a suburban everyman turned avenging killer in ”Deliverance.” Today, he’s all loopy grandpa, which is a role he plays for his six grandchildren now that he has reconciled with his once-estranged daughter, Angelina Jolie.

No one is spared Voight’s seething right-wing political opinions, including his daughter, who he feels has fallen victim to antisemitic subterfuge. (“Angelina wishes him well but does not speak about him publicly,” said a source close to the actress.) He says her politics are, to put it mildly, not his, while his are the subject of an endless circular conversation — especially now that Trump is on the upswing. The actor is a staunch supporter of Israel, most recently its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, and Jolie is a longtime refugee activist, currently decrying Israel’s killing of women and children in Gaza. In our conversations, Voight never lets it go, criticizing her Palestinian stance repeatedly, like a candidate going after an opponent in a 30-second ad. “She has been exposed to propaganda,” he says. “She’s been influenced by antisemitic people. Angie has a connection to the U.N., and she’s enjoyed speaking out for refugees. But these people are not refugees.”

Back in Beverly Hills, Voight keeps it light. We move into the house, and he bounds up the stairs to his bedroom. Hanging on the wall are faux stones from the 1999 TV miniseries “Noah’s Ark,” in which Voight portrayed the titular character. There’s his easel and a large photo of his father. He puts on a robe and spreads out on his bed. A giant smile crosses his face, and his blue eyes are lit. “What else do you need?”

Once the photographer leaves, Voight falls into a chair at his dining room table. He looks tired. It has already been an exhausting summer. Not only is he doing press for “Megalopolis,” but he’s getting ready to move from the house where he’s lived for the past two decades.

His home currently resembles a set being struck down. There are boxes of books scattered everywhere. His Oscar for “Coming Home” is somewhere on the premises. In the living room, large framed photographs of Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr. and various Indian yogis dominate the space. Upstairs, photos of Jolie and her ex-husband Brad Pitt are prominently displayed, including a 2008 People magazine cover of the couple holding newborn twins. (The family photos cut out of magazines roughly correspond with the times when Voight and Jolie were estranged.) Downstairs, there’s a sketchbook and a drawing for his granddaughter Vivienne that he will send her wishing her a happy birthday and congratulating her on the success of Broadway’s “The Outsiders,” which Voight says she brought to Jolie’s attention, and they went on to produce together.

Two of the best examples of Voight’s approach to morphing into characters include his appearances as Nate, a criminal operator with some startling facial disfigurements in “Heat” and his chameleonic Oscar-nominated turn as sportscaster Howard Cosell in “Ali,” both Michael Mann films.

“For Jon, the transformation, that’s the adventure,” says Mann. “The adventure is the wild way he gets to transform himself to get into this character. As a director, I know enough about Jon that the further into outer space the idea is, the more attractive it is.”

Mann says that Voight spent more than four hours every day in makeup being transformed into Cosell. Between takes, Voight and Will Smith, as Muhammad Ali, would verbally spar in character to the delight of hundreds of extras. “I was trying to set up shots, and then all of a sudden, these guys are doing ad-libs so good I’m trying to write it down,” says Mann.

Praise like that is what keeps Voight working in lefty Hollywood even as he compares Joe Biden to Satan and muses that George Soros is hell-bent on destroying the country. Hollywood is in a recession, and Trumpists like Scott Baio and Kevin Sorbo have been banished to right-wing productions and reality TV. Jon Voight? He has appeared in three movies in the past 24 months.

Sometimes, over the past year, Voight called late at night just to say hello. We spoke of Blake’s “Jerusalem,” our children, Renaissance art and how Burt Reynolds broke his tailbone doing his own stunts in “Deliverance.” There were two Jons in our conversations: the cultured and kind acting icon, curious about art and poetry, and the right-wing warrior ripping Biden and dismissing Palestinians as frauds with no claim to the Holy Land.

Under normal circumstances, an actor of Voight’s stature and age would be feted at festivals and film schools, but that’s not been the case with Voight, and it undoubtedly connects to his politics. Instead, the actor cuts a forlorn figure, showing up at the occasional party or art gallery in L.A. with his son, James Haven. At a gallery opening in Beverly Hills in December, a visitor whispered to a friend, “That’s Jon Voight — he says some crazy-ass things.”

After Cannes, Voight stopped in New York on his way back to take in “The Outsiders.” “It was amazing,” he says proudly. “Angie is amazing.”

Father and daughter seem to be getting along better these days. That is, except when Voight is attacking her over the Israel-Hamas war. Jolie has been an advocate for refugees for more than two decades. She has worked on projects bringing attention to genocides in Southeast Asia and in the former Yugoslavia. People listened when she released a statement last November on the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

“This is the deliberate bombing of a trapped population who have nowhere to flee,” wrote Jolie on Instagram three weeks into the conflict. “Gaza has been an open-air prison for nearly two decades and is fast becoming a mass grave. 40% of those killed are innocent children. … Whole families are being murdered.”

Voight responded with his own post on Twitter a day later. It started, “I’m very disappointed that my daughter, like so many, has no understanding of God’s honor, God’s truths. This is justice for God’s children of the Holy Land. ….”

This seemed massively counterproductive, because Voight has spent the past 30 years trying to right the wrongs of his wild years with his children. And yet, during our conversations, Voight, who keeps praising his daughter’s talent and accomplishments, cannot resist repeatedly schooling her on his political worldview. Voight’s relationship with his children has been fraught since their mother, Marcheline Bertrand, divorced him in 1978, citing adultery. During his children’s adolescence, Voight wasn’t around much, and over the years, there have been schisms, silence and reconciliation.

“I love my daughter — that’s No. 1,” he says. “I am happy when Angie is happy.” His eyes begin to well up with tears. “When she’s having a tough time, I’m having a tough time. When she is down, I’m down.”

That sentiment makes his public attacks on his daughter all the more puzzling. For instance, in May, we meet for coffee in Hollywood, and Voight offers long monologues on the history of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Ottoman Empire’s decline that, he says, conclusively prove Jolie’s position is profoundly wrong. He then falls back on an old chestnut of Hollywood detractors.

“Angie, I think she hasn’t been available to this information because in Hollywood people don’t share this kind of stuff,” he says. “They’re way off. They have no idea what’s going on. It’s a bubble.”

Leaving aside the fact that Voight lives in Beverly Hills and had us meet twice in the shadow of studio lots, it’s hard to believe that Jolie isn’t able to access the right information. I bring this up, and he disagrees. His face goes red, and beads of sweat appear on his forehead. “I love my daughter. I don’t want to fight with my daughter,” he says heatedly. “But the fact is, I think she has been influenced by the U.N. From the beginning, it’s been awful with human rights. They call it human rights, but it’s just anti-Israel bashing.”

Heads turn in the café. Voight is talking louder than usual and continues without taking a breath. “She’s ignorant of what the real stakes are and what the real story is because she’s in the loop of the United Nations.”

He finally stops and sighs. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about all this politics stuff.”

After the Fourth of July holiday, I get a message from Voight asking if we could meet for a quick lunch at the Beverly Glen Deli before he leaves to shoot a film in Bulgaria. The request seems odd: We had already said a last goodbye at his house. I wonder what’s left to say and suspect he’s going to try to take back the words he said about Jolie’s views on Gaza. 

The exact opposite occurs. It’s a week after Joe Biden’s incoherent debate performance, and Voight is feeling vindicated. “It’s a disgrace, all the drugs and steroids they’ve been shooting him up with,” he says. He struggles to open the pull tab on a can of root beer. I’m about to reach over and help when he grimaces with concentration and the pop-top relents. 

I’ve asked Voight on multiple occasions if I could talk with his son, Jamie, with whom he reconciled a few years ago. I asked first after Voight proudly told me Jamie was going to direct him in a film this summer. Voight delayed the meeting with Jamie for months, and I gave up the pursuit. But a few minutes into our lunch, Jamie, in his 50s, arrives at the deli. He is well moisturized and dressed all in white, including a skull cap. He launches into a monologue about a number of topics — the film, his involvement in a K-Pop project, his work with troubled children, why Linus is his favorite Peanuts character and how “Star Wars” changed his life. His father beams. I suspect the movie will never happen.

Jamie steps out for a moment. I steel myself for Voight sweet-talking me in an attempt to get me to soften his statements about his daughter. But instead he starts another lecture about Jolie’s Israel information deficit. “It comes from ignorance, like everything else,” Voight says. “It’s like, why are these kids in the universities siding with Hamas, right? It’s because of ignorance. They don’t know the story.”

I realize that this is the key to being Jon Voight. He can sell Coppola’s Crassus because he believes it. He can convince me of his spiritual conversion because he believed that too. But that self-belief — a requirement of any actor, but stronger in Voight than in anyone else I’ve interviewed — has toxic consequences: A true believer cannot comprehend that someone, much less his own flesh and blood, might hold a different view.

I ask him, not for the first time, if he thinks that instead of attacking Jolie on Instagram, he might just pick up the phone. He shakes his head. “It’s hard for me to talk to her about this,” he says with a resigned look. “She doesn’t really want to share this kind of stuff, because she’s of another mind about it.”

Instead, he filibusters about the myth of the Palestinian homeland, referencing the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate over the Holy Land from 1920 to 1948. It’s the same talk he gave me a few weeks ago, almost verbatim. After about 10 minutes, I gently tell him he explained all of this to me before. He looks confused. “Are you sure?”

At this moment, Voight does not look like a movie star or a soldier for Trump. He just looks lost and agitated, not unlike Biden on the night of his debate.

Five days later, Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. Voight and I connect after a couple of missed calls. He sees Trump’s survival as a sign and speaks of it in messianic terms. “There’s a prophet who predicted there was going to be an attempt on his life,” says Voight. “He was going to go to his knees, and during the moment he was on his knees, he was going to connect with God.”

He then mentions the evil that’s spreading across the world via satanists like Soros. He says we can too easily access it on our smartphones.

I suggest that both sides need to turn down the heat, and that maybe he could take a step back from claiming the Biden Administration is populated by evildoers.

The line goes quiet for a moment. “Well, that’s your opinion,” Voight says. “I’m very careful about what I say. But when I see the attacks on this man, I know they’re coming from a hateful, evil place.”

He transitions quickly to Jolie being brainwashed by antisemitic propagandists and then a familiar stalking horse, Soros.

“What do you say about Soros?” Voight says. “That he seems normal when you talk about him? No. He bought out DAs, he bought out judges, he bought out politicians. You have to have strength. You have to be righteous.”

And that’s when I give up. For all the lovely talk Voight and I had about paintings, poetry and Old Hollywood over deli sandwiches and root beers, it is now clear that he is also coming from a hateful place. He natters on about Marxists and other ghosts, but I tune him out. I tell him I must go, but he wants to end on a hopeful note.

“I’ve been the most outspoken supporter of Donald Trump in Hollywood,” he says with pride. “I’ve been saying he’s the answer, the only answer.” He slips into the third person for the first time in all our conversations. “Now, after this, maybe they will look at Jon Voight in a different way. If Donald Trump is being revealed in this way, maybe they will see a supporter like me in a different light.”

I wish him a good night. There is nothing left to say.



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