Billy Bob Thornton Reflects on Marriage to Angelina Jolie, Blood Vial Necklaces: ‘I Had a Great Time’

Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie were the most unlikely, eccentric celebrity couple of the early 2000s — and Thornton wouldn’t change a thing.

“Angelina and I had a great time together,” the Landman actor, 70, told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Monday, November 17. “That was one of the greatest times of my life.”

Their 2000 marriage helped establish Jolie’s bad-girl early public image — then-fiancée Laura Dern has said Thornton ghosted her when he eloped in Las Vegas with the Tomb Raider star — and was punctuated by wild public displays of affection. (Remember when they cheekily told an MTV reporter that they’d just had sex in the limo after arriving at a movie premiere?!)

There was also the longstanding rumor that they wore each other’s blood in vials around their neck, which Thornton disputes. “We each had a little locket, literally with a drop of blood in them,” the Bad Santa star told Rolling Stone. “That’s a romantic little idea, and that’s all that was. But by the time it’s over, we’re vampires. We live in a dungeon, we drink each other’s blood, and this kind of stuff.”

Jolie, now 50, was still wed to Thornton when she adopted son Maddox, now 24, in Cambodia in 2002 — and they gave a statement to the press announcing that they had become parents together. They even noted that Thornton’s sons, William, then 8, and Harry, then 7 (with his ex-wife, Playboy model Pietra Dawn Cherniak) were “very excited to meet him,” per Entertainment Weekly.

But the couple split later that year. “She and I are still very, very close friends. And that was the one that ended up being a really civilized breakup,” the Fargo alum told Rolling Stone. “We simply split up because our lifestyles were so different.”