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One of the nice things about the promotion for Without Blood is that Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie’s friendship and mutual admiration will be on display the whole time. They became friends several years ago while working on The Eternals, and Salma has become a convert to Team Jolie. Salma is already doing the most to praise Angelina and her kids – Pax and Maddox both worked on Without Blood, and Salma told outlets that “they work hard” and they were very professional on set with their mom. Salma also said this of Angelina:

“This is the best actors director I’ve ever worked with,” she admitted, and did not state it lightly. “I’ve never felt so valued. She knew I was the right actress. I didn’t even know I was the right actress at the moment.” She added that this was a rare situation, where she knew that “I could call my director at three in the morning in absolute despair” because “if [it] meant she came over there in the middle of the night and held me, that’s what she would do.”

[From EW]

What strikes me is that Angelina cast her friend in an age-appropriate role where Salma could not fall back on her own sexiness and beauty. Salma is playing a woman who saw her family murdered in front of her. It is a “juicy role” for an actress and it scared the hell out of Salma, but she decided to do it because of Angelina. Without Blood is also yet another Jolie-directed film about war and conflict, because four out of five films she’s directed have been about that:

Of the five films Angelina Jolie has directed, four have depicted war. But her latest, “Without Blood,” delves most directly into the haunting aftermath of the carnage.

“I think conflict tends to bring out absolutely the worst in our behavior toward each other and often the best, when those who fight against or rise above,” Jolie said during an interview at the Variety Toronto Film Festival Studio. “As artists, a lot of our work is this study of what it is to be human. So these extremes of the human condition are what we’re trying to understand sometimes and are drawn to. Certainly I’m somebody who, as I’ve traveled and done other [humanitarian] work in the field, I’ve always questioned why and how.”

Jolie was joined by the film’s stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, who play Nina and Tito, respectively, two people who stood on opposite sides of an unspecified war years earlier. Hayek Pinault, for one, admitted that she was reluctant to sign on for her second collaboration with Jolie. (They previously starred together in the 2021 Marvel tentpole “Eternals.”)

“I was afraid to play this part. I was not immediately jumping in it because she suffers so much, my character, and I had to go there and suffer for the entire time of the shooting,” she said. “You cannot expel the pain. You have to keep it boiling, boiling, boiling for hours, for days, for weeks. So I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it. The more we talked about it … I started seeing myself, my own traumas, the traumas of people that I know, that are close to me, in this character that was so foreign at the beginning and where I didn’t want to go. I started realizing, ‘What do you mean you don’t want to go? You’ve always been there.’ I started seeing how it connected to so many women even if you’re not post-war. We’ve all been tossed aside and not seen or abused in one way or another.”

[From Variety]

I’m just going to put this out there… what if Salma and Angelina are both nominated for Best Actress? Angelina for Maria and Salma for Without Blood. I’m not saying it will happen, but it’s an interesting thought exercise. They would both probably spend too much time campaigning for each other.

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Photos courtesy of Getty, Avalon Red.