Actor Angelina Jolie, in news over a divorce settlement with Brad Pitt, had once thought about hiring a hitman to kill herself. The comment, originally made during an interview to IMDb in 2001, is making the rounds on the internet and gaining a lot of traction. Ms Jolie was in her 20s then and said the reason for the bizarre move was that she thought it would be easier for her loved ones to deal with her death if she was murdered, rather than if she killed herself.
"This is going to sound insane but there was a time I was going to hire somebody to kill me," she told IMDb.
She opened up further in an interview with The Face two years later.
"They (hitmen) are not that hard to find in New York. As insane as it sounds, I think a lot of people consider suicide when they're young," she had further said in the interview.
The actor said that she was "very aware" that many people around her would "feel as though they didn't give enough or do enough" if she'd taken her own life. "So my solution to that was if someone else had taken my life - like in a 'robbery' - then it would be murder and it wouldn't be that anyone would feel they'd let me down."
However, she was surprised by the response from the hitman.
"He was a decent enough person and asked if I could think about it and call him again in two months. Something changed in my life and I figured I'd stick it out," said Ms Jolie.
The actor talked about her dark past on CBS News' 60 Minutes show. "I went through heavier, darker times and I survived them. I didn't die young, so I'm very lucky. There are other artists and people who didn't survive certain things. I think people can imagine that I did the most dangerous and I did the worst," she said.
Ms Jolie told Time Magazine a few years after the interview that becoming mother to six children enabled her to grow as a person.
Ms Jolie and Mr Pitt began dating after he and his then-wife Jennifer Aniston announced their divorce in 2005.
They got engaged in 2012 and married in 2014. However, two years later, Ms Jolie filed for divorce. According to People Magazine, they are now approaching a divorce settlement nearly eight years after their break-up.
