Billy Bob Thornton: Angelina Jolie Was Too Good For Me, I Blew It

May 18, 2012 by Hollywoodite

Billy Bob Thornton gave an interview with ABC’s Nightline, promoting the memoirs for which ex-wife Angelina Jolie wrote the forward.

Thornton is currently in the midst of his press tour for the imaginatively-named The Billy Bob Tapes: A Cave Full of Ghosts (more or less annoying book title than Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook?) In the book, evidently with Jolie’s co-sign, Thornton addresses what went wrong in the marriage: his fifth marriage, lasting from 2000 to 2003, with four others spanning 1978 to 1997, producing two children, and one subsequent long term partnership from 2003 to now that spawned one more child.

Addressing the failed marriage to Jolie, Thornton mostly takes on the blame himself; shifting a little to the media. He admits he was generally “insecure” and “blew it” because he didn’t feel “good enough” largely due to negative, mocking media coverage of the marriage and its purported oddities. Although, Thornton also blames the power shift in the relationship on Jolie’s rising star. He plays it off as though she was some undiscovered ingenue who blew up. However, in 2000, when they married, she won an Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted, and she’d already been in major blockbusters  and assorted leading/ supporting roles earning her Emmy noms and such.

He says, in part: “I blew it because I didn’t think I was good enough for her. I was just too insecure. People actually said that I didn’t deserve to be with her… Angie, I felt, was definitely too good for me and at some point, if you believe somebody’s too good for you, you’re going to mess it up. I always thought I was sort of Quasimodo or the Phantom Of The Opera hiding in the catacombs.”

He continues: “When I was with her I think that really reached its heights. When you’re in a relationship, any two celebrities or whatever, you know, I think that puts on a lot of pressure. When Angie and I got married, during that time, I was more famous than she was to start with. Then she becomes this big thing, it’s hard in these relationships. We had a great marriage and I chickened out because I didn’t feel good enough. That’s all that happened. It was no big deal, we never hated each other.”