Long before Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie became the "Brangelina", they were lovers. At the time of their meeting, the actor was indeed spinning the perfect love with Jennifer Aniston, which we find in the meeting of Friends, online on the Salto platform this Thursday, May 27. Jen may have advanced in her life as in her career, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie may have separated in 2016, the trio continues to fascinate. As long as the "Brangelina" try to manage the education of their six children, the press wants to believe in a reconciliation. Even if it is just as much that Jennifer Aniston recrosses her ex-husband on a red carpet for them to be said ready to start all over again together. As if the heart of Brad Pitt should remain torn between the two actresses. Back to a love triangle that marked the star system.

That day, America's heart broke. On January 7, 2005, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, the most glamorous and sexiest couple in Hollywood, separated after ten years of an almost perfect love. The news had the effect of a bomb, but it was only the formalization of a situation that had become untenable for several months. Indeed, it took all the denial of which Hollywood propriety is capable to refuse to see the truth in the face: the "Angelina factor", nickname given by the American press to the explosive phenomenon which followed the meeting of Pitt and Jolie on the set of Mr & Mrs. Smith, at the end of 2003, had accomplished her work of destruction with implacable perfection.

During this interminable period, and until the official pronunciation of the divorce in October 2005, a strange love triangle was formed around which rumors, media operations and theatrical stunts were unleashed like in a melodrama with a haywire staging. In the cast, Jennifer Aniston, the star of Friends, who has become America's little bride, in the role of the sacrificial victim. At her side, two lovers orchestrate, with a diabolical art of the unspoken and the evasive, a story soon too cumbersome to be concealed.

Despite the predictions of a clairvoyant, Jennifer Aniston didn't want to see the danger

It all started in November 2003. Director Doug Liman began the long-delayed filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a romantic action comedy in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a married couple of hitmen who find themselves, by chance, in charge of eliminating each other. The filmmaker, who wants to create sexual tension between the two stars, tries a bet: from the first scene, Brad and Angelina are seated side by side, facing a marriage counselor. "They don't really know each other. They are embarrassed. It immediately jumps to the eyes that there is a deep affinity between them, ”summarized later Liman, quite proud of his gamble.

Jennifer Aniston, reassured by the fact that her husband is filming a few miles from their Malibu villa, has she neglected the danger? Faye, the clairvoyant of the stars whom she consults regularly, predicted that Angelina was a "dark angel", but Aniston is then too busy launching her career in the cinema to measure what awaits her. The only time that his path crosses that of Angelina, the carefree will even wish him "to have a lot of fun" with her husband! As Brad prepares to celebrate his fortieth birthday in December, fate seems sealed. Four years after their wedding to great fanfare, Pitt and his wife are at a turning point in their respective careers. Jen, addicted to work, multiplies the shootings. The beautiful kid from the Midwest, he only thinks of starting a family and dreams of new horizons.

Angelina Jolie's son Maddox whets Brad's fatherhood cravings

We now know that the adulterous affair was largely cemented by Brad's affection for Maddox, Angelina's adopted son, often present on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. These moments of complicity, between two takes, bring the actors a little closer together and, despite their categorical denials, fuel the rumor of an affair. Part of the year 2004 thus boils down to a three-way marivaudage, the stakes of which are difficult to disentangle. As the filming drags on and its two heroes hesitate less and less to hide their attraction (especially during a sensual dance scene extended long after the director's "cut!"), a few breaks allow them to give the illusion that they are busy with other occupations. “Neither of them would ever admit it, but it looked like they had some sort of pact,” Andrew Morton sums up in his unauthorized biography of Angelina Jolie, published in 2010.

While Angelina travels around the world as an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Brad parades alongside Jennifer, from New York to Cannes, to present the film Troy. We will still see the couple in Rome exchanging complicit moments during the filming of Ocean's Twelve... However, when that of Mr. & Mrs. Smith resumed in August 2004, everything accelerated. In October, when the film crew settles on the Amalfi Coast, Pitt and Jolie no longer hesitate to share the same suite with Maddox or to coo during their public appearances. Jennifer Aniston, for her part, seems to have resigned herself to the possibility of the worst. In London, where she is filming the thriller Derailed, she multiplies the drunken evenings in the city's trendy clubs or in her suite, at the Dorchester hotel, throughout the autumn. Brad's visit to the English capital to promote Ocean's Twelve is no pretext for any intimacy.

As soon as they return to Los Angeles (on different flights!), the couple cancels for mysterious reasons the big birthday party planned for Brad's forty-first birthday. It must be said that the “Angelina factor” now poisons until the rare moments when Pitt and Aniston find themselves face to face. In addition to the surging gossip, Angelina's repeated phone calls to Brad and Jennifer's home (including a hastily interrupted "phone sex" session) and the actor's continual allusions to his playmate (including he admires humanitarian commitments) have long shaken the stability of the couple. In an interview with Italian Vanity Fair, Brad hinted at the possibility of a separation ("I'm not sure that staying with one person all your life is part of our nature"), while insisting on his desire to have children as soon as possible. At the same time, very strangely, Angelina Jolie has just been refused the adoption of a second son in Russia…

Upon returning from a last trip to the tropics, Brad and Jennifer announce a "friendly" separation

Nothing seems to hold anymore in this threesome that does not say its name. A few relatives try to deny the obvious, like Brad's mother, Jane, who gives Aniston a ring marked with a "P" on December 25, 2004. The Pitt spouses resolve to spend New Year's Day on the island of Anguilla with their loved ones, Courteney Cox and David Arquette. But this trip has nothing to do with a honeymoon or a new beginning: less than a week later, on the famous January 7, 2005, the breakup is formalized. How to justify that such an amorous masquerade has thus extended over more than a year? One explanation could lie in the fact that Brad and Jennifer's estate amounted to more than 225 million euros (with, among other things, four residences, a yacht that once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor and a luxurious production company, Plan B ).

By claiming that their separation was the fruit of long reflection and that they remained friends – to the point of throwing a big party for Jennifer's birthday on February 11 or showing up together at receptions before the Oscars – the Pitt spouses would have more or less preserved their financial interests. Less convinced by these stories of calculations than by the remorse felt by the unfaithful husband, Andrew Morton quotes a psychologist close to the three protagonists: “Brad was targeted by Angelina. But he was bored with Jen, he was tired of seeing her so dependent and carrying her at arm's length. »

By the time Aniston filed for divorce in March, Pitt and Jolie just had to formalize their relationship. They did this by allowing themselves to be photographed with Maddox on a Kenyan beach in April, then parodying an average American family in the pages of W magazine in July. That same month, they welcomed little Zahara, an Ethiopian baby saved from death. Less than a year later, Shiloh, their first biological child, joined their blended family. ; Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt made sure, it is true, that they did not transgress anything. In appearance, at least...

Text by Vincent Malausa

This article was originally published in Gala magazine n° 1155 dated July 29, 2015.

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