It’s notorious for being the film that brought Brangelina together, so it’s nigh on impossible to imagine 2005 thriller Mr and Mrs Smith with anyone other than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the titular lead roles.
However, Hollywood history could have been very, very different indeed, with another A-list starlet coming close to landing Jolie’s part: Gwen Stefani.
Speaking on the Howard Stern radio show, the No Doubt singer revealed ‘I feel like I almost got [the role.] I went to a bunch of auditions.’
Stefani, who had previously taken a role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 2004’s biopic The Aviator, claimed that the audition process was tough, but in the end her love of music won out over thoughts of Hollywood stardom. ‘[It was] very competitive,’ she said. ‘I wanted to do it, but I wanted to do music more.’
Stefani’s loss was Jolie’s gain. The film, which tells the story of two married assassins who are hired to kill one another, went on to make nearly $500 million worldwide.
It’s not the first time that Stefani has alluded to what might have been. Speaking to US Vogue back in 2008, the singer said ‘it was between me and Angelina Jolie, and I’m like, “Oh, great. I got a shot here. Whenever I’ve done it, whenever I had moments where it works, it’s just like performing. You hit a moment. And that’s what movies are: a series of moments.’
Jolie and Pitt, who were married in a secret ceremony in 2014, famously hit things off on the set of the film, with Pitt later going on to divorce Jennifer Aniston.
Speaking to Vogue about the relationship, Jolie said, ‘It took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realize that it might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe.’
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