Angelina Jolie Opens Up About Her Split From Brad Pitt

Angelina Jolie spoke out about her split from Brad Pitt for the first time over the weekend.

As Nicki Swift previously reported, Jolie, 41, filed for divorce from Pitt, 53, in September 2016 after 12 years together and two years of marriage. After a bitter and public custody battle, the estranged couple filed a joint statement vowing to keep their custody and divorce proceedings private in January 2017.

The actress spoke to the BBC in Cambodia, where she was promoting her film First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Remembers (2017), along with her and Pitt's six children: Maddox, 15, Pax, 13, Zahara, 12, Shiloh, 10, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 8.

When asked about what sparked the divorce (allegedly an altercation between Jolie, Maddox, and Pitt on a private flight), a weeping Jolie said, "I don't want to say very much about [the incident] except to say that it was a very difficult time and we are a family. And we'll always be a family, and we'll get through this time and hopefully be a stronger family for it."

She continued, "My family, we've all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children, and it is—and my focus is finding this way through. And as I said, we are and forever will be a family. And so that is how I'm coping. I'm coping with finding a way through to make sure this somehow makes us stronger and closer."

As far as how things have been going since the divorce announcement, she said, "It's been a difficult few months. Right now, I'm going through a moment where there's just, everybody's in my room," she added with a chuckle. "Two hamsters and two dogs and two children at the moment. It's wonderful. So usually, I just wake up trying to figure out who's going to get the dog out, who's gonna start the pancakes and did anybody brush their teeth."

Jolie also reflected on where she sees herself and her family in five years. She laughed, "At that stage do I have all teenagers? At that stage I hope just standing!" Then she got serious. "In five years' time I would like to be traveling around the world visiting my children, hoping that they're just happy and doing interesting things in, I imagine, many different parts of the world, and I'll be supporting them," she said. Then, perhaps shading Pitt, who reportedly wanted to continue a Hollywood lifestyle as opposed to Jolie's globe-trotting humanitarianism, she concluded, "And everything I do, I hope is that I represent something, and I represent the right things to my children and I give them the right sense of what they're capable of, and the world as it should be seen, not through the prism of Hollywood or through a certain kind of life but really take them into the world where they have a really good sense of the come-round of people."