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Angelina Jolie: My Maleficent Costume Scared Son Pax to Tears, Kids “Wouldn’t Come Near Me”

Angelina Jolie as Maleficent on the cover of Entertainment Weekly
Angelina Jolie tells Entertainment Weekly that her Maleficent costume scared son Pax to tears, and other kids "wouldn't come near me."

Mom, is that you? In the March 8 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Angelina Jolie reveals the real reason her 5-year-old daughter Vivienne was cast as the young Princess Aurora in her upcoming Disney thriller Maleficent — her role as the titular villain scared other children!

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"We think it's fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That's not our goal for Brad [Pitt] and I at all," Jolie, 38, explained of raising her six children with fiance Pitt. "But the other 3-and 4-year-old [performers] wouldn't come near me. It had to be a child that liked me and wasn't afraid of my horns and my eyes and my claws. So it had to be Viv."

Specifically daughter Vivian because her other children — Maddox, 12, Pax, 10, Zahara, 9, Shiloh, 7, and Vivienne's twin brother Knox — were also terrified of their mom in costume.

"When Pax saw me for the first time, he ran away and got upset — and I thought he was kidding, so I was pretending to chase him until I actually found him crying," Jolie recalled. "I had to take off pieces [of the makeup] in front of him to show him it was all fake and not freak out so much."

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After Jolie's children told her not to play the villain in the movie, the actress tried to change their minds by sharing a more sympathetic side to her "Mistress of All Evil" character.

"I said, 'Let me tell you the real story but you can't tell anybody,'" she recalled. "So this was my test too, like any parent. The next day, I heard Shiloh getting into a fight with another kid, defending Maleficent, saying, 'You don't understand her!' They got into a bit of an argument and I thought, that's the reason to do the film."

Jolie explained: "When that character makes mistakes — which Maleficent does, and crosses many lines — you want them to be angry at her and concerned and confused and in the end, somehow understand something that they didn't know before."

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The speech to her kids worked, and Pax and Zahara also had cameo appearances in the film during the christening scene, when Maleficent places a curse on Aurora. "I had to walk by them being very mean," Jolie said. "Of course, I wanted to stop and wink at them."

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