Angelina Jolie on Anderson Cooper

I would not normally post about something as vapid as celebrity interviews on CNN, but I happened to watch the encore presentation of Anderson Cooper’s interview with Angelina Jolie over the weekend. (Transcript available here). What was a pleasant surprise for me was that Jolie came across as believable and quite sincere about her work with the United Nations. You can always be skeptical about celebrity elites who are misguided and uninformed activists, as the New York Times was in its review of the Jolie interview. It is certainly easy to discount someone who has “know your rights” tattooed to her body. But I came away from the interview with a more positive impression of Jolie than I expected. From the interview I learned that she gives one-third of her salary away, has adopted a Cambodian and Ethiopian child, and has visited over twenty countries as a UN representative. That doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who is doing this as a celebrity stunt. Here are a few excerpts from the interview that convinced me that Jolie is quite real and genuine about her international philanthropic work:

On Her Support for the UN: Well, because I think we hear a lot of — we certainly hear a lot of the negative things and — about the U.N. You … hear about the negative things that have gone on. You don’t hear on a daily basis the amount of people that are kept alive or protected by the U.N. And if that list was plastered everywhere, I think people would be in shock and have a little more respect. I certainly think it … needs reform. I mean, it’s certainly not a perfect organization, by any means. It’s the closest thing that we have got, you know, to — to a real international institution that listens to all sides, represents all sides, and … can make … certain kinds of decisions.



On The Death of A Child in a Refugee Camp: The child I met in Sierra Leone was the first child that I met who was about to die and who died the next day…. And I still to this day … feel I should have helicoptered him out and spent the money and done something and saved him. Even though I probably couldn’t have. But I still have guilt about that and I still see his face, I always will. And maybe it’s the first kid that you feel connected to their death, or whatever it may be. But he’ll always be symbolic to me of that. Of the bigger picture of all those kids.



On Human Rights Laws: When I started to look at these declarations … or just basic human rights, and you start to look at them, and you start to see, well, it’s right here. This — the Declaration of Human Rights says everybody has the right to an education, or everybody has the right to freedom of movement. Everybody has the right — you know, that these things are in our law. There are — there are — if you really look into it, we’re all protected somehow.



On Funding Priorities: You start to see — the more times I have been to Washington, the more times you talk to somebody about, we have got to get money for AIDS orphans, … whether it be any kind of response to any tragedy, often, the answer is, well, we’re at — we are at war right now…. And, so, whether you’re for or against the war, you can certainly see that the amount of money being spent at war and the amount of money we are not spending in countries and dealing with situations that could end up in conflict if left unassisted, and then cause war. So, you know — so, our priorities are quite strange. So, we’re not — we are missing a lot of opportunities to do a lot of the good that America is used to doing, has a history of doing. And we’re not able to be as generous. We’re not able to be on the forefront of all of these wonderful things as much. And, so, whether or not you’re for or against the war, you have to start to notice that that — that there’s something wrong with that.

I would welcome the thoughts of others who saw the interview if they came away from the interview with the same impression. Should I be more skeptical of Jolie?