Before Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie were trading vials of blood, swapping underwear,
and generally being the picture of early aughts romantic extremity, Billy Bob dated the Jurassic
Park star, Laura Dern.
Moreover, when he married Angie, he and Laura were still TOGETHER!
In today’s video, we’re looking into this mess of a love triangle, including how Thornton
explained himself later on.
Now, imagine that you were living with your significant other and only discovered their
betrayal after you returned from a work trip ... and they married the person they left
you for… while you were away.
Ouch.
Of course, if you’re Laura Dern, you don’t need to imagine — because it actually happened
to her.
Before the Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Jennifer Aniston scandal, another love triangle
was at play involving Jolie.
Yes, the actor found herself in the middle of another messy breakup between Laura Dern
and Billy Bob Thornton, who went on to become Jolie’s husband.
But before they walked down the aisle, Thornton was engaged to Dern.
The couple was living together before their relationship came to a crashing end after
he met Jolie.
Laura Dern is a Hollywood actor who has starred in both successful TV and film projects, including
Big Little Lies, I am Sam, Jurassic Park and Marriage Story.
She ticked off a major career goal last year when she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar
for her role as divorce lawyer Nora Fanshaw in the latter.
But Dern was no stranger to Hollywood — her parents are beloved stars Bruce Dern and Diane
Ladd.
In her Oscar’s acceptance speech last year, she called them her “heroes”.
“Some say you never meet your heroes, but I say, if you are really blessed, you get
them as your parents,” she said on stage.
“I share this with my acting heroes, my legends, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern.
You got game.
I love you.”
Billy Bob Thornton is an actor best known for his roles in Goliath, Bandits and Bad
Santa.
He is also a musician, filmmaker and producer, winning an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay
in 1997 for his involvement in the drama Sling Blade, which he also starred and directed.
Laura and Billy Bob crossed paths in early 1997 when they both guest-starred on one of
the most groundbreaking television episodes in modern history: The Puppy Episode of Ellen.
That’s right, the one where Ellen DeGeneres comes out as gay to Dern, Oprah, and
the entire world, basically.
At the time, Dern was fresh from her split with Jurassic Park co-star Jeff Goldblum,
whom she dated from 1995 to 1997.
Thornton was also in the midst of divorcing his fourth wife.
After having bit roles in the Ellen episode, Laura and Billy Bob began dating.
They would later get engaged and move in together in LA.
Dern thought their relationship was solid, but she was proven wrong, sadly.
The actor was ever the supportive girlfriend.
In late 1998 Thornton admitted he’d gotten unhealthily skinny for a role, telling the
Los Angeles Daily News, “Frankly, for a while there, I think I had a little mental
problem.”
But it was Dern who tried to force him to confront his issue.
“I denied it to my girlfriend and everyone else who said I had an eating disorder.”
And, even though Thornton had an unfortunate preference for the red-carpet baseball cap,
he and Dern still made a stylish pair.
They had been together for three years, and she was well on the way to becoming the actor’s
fifth wife when she left the home they shared and went away to work on a movie.
The couple’s relationship ended abruptly in 1999.
Laura admitted she had no idea it was over until she heard about the marriage — and
she never heard from Billy Bob again.
The David Lynch muse broke her silence on the breakup by saying, “It’s like a sudden
death.
For no one has there been any closure or clarity.”
She revealed that one of the most painful parts of the situation was that Billy Bob
ghosted her — and she felt like she never got any closure.
The split was apparently so acrimonious that Laura had to enlist the help of a friend,
Melissa Etheridge , to help her get her stuff back from the house she shared with Billy
Bob.
Melissa recounted the situation while speaking with Andy Cohen on his Sirius XM radio show
back in 2016.
“I was around when Angelina was not doing nice things with Billy Bob to Laura Dern,”
she shared.
“I helped Laura move out of her house with Billy Bob – I like broke into their home
to get their stuff out because it was so nasty.”
As it turns out, Thornton had married Angelina Jolie after reportedly forming a relationship
while on the set of the comedy-drama Pushing Tin, which co-starred John Cusack and Cate
Blanchett . A year later, the couple eloped to Las Vegas, leaving Dern without a clue
as to what had happened.
Jolie and Thornton quickly became one of Hollywood’s most talked-about couples, while Dern was
left to deal with the breakup.
So naturally, Dern was justifiably shaking by this split — or, well, lack thereof?
Thornton was kind of apologetic.
He weighed in on the controversy in 2001 by saying, “Others may say that you left our
girl and married someone else.
But it made me happy and somebody else happy.
I’m sorry it caused pain.”
During his marriage to Angelina, which lasted from 2000 until 2003, Billy Bob opened up
about the situation with Laura and admitted he’d messed up.
“See, I’ve fucked a lot of things up.
I’ve been wrong.
In relationships, I’ve been, like, not present.
Or doing some wrong things...
I don’t want to go to couples therapy to solve a relationship.
I don’t want to work on it.
I don’t believe in it, never have,” he told the Guardian.
Laura and Billy Bob may not have had any heart-to-hearts, but they’ve certainly seen each other since
then.
Twitter was sent into a frenzy during the Golden Globes in 2017 when Thornton walked
past Dern to accept his award at the podium.
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, he can be seen passing right by Dern’s table,
who elegantly turns her head away to avoid eye contact.
That’s a fair reaction to someone who ghosted you before the term even existed.
What’s even more bizarre than this whole messy triangle is the fact that Laura Dern
and Angelina Jolie actually knew each other from their childhood in Hollywood.
While Laura and Angie weren’t in the same circles as actors, they did have a prior history.
As it turns out, Dern had babysat Jolie due to their father’s being some of Hollywood’s
most prominent actors.
“Jon Voight’s a friend of mine, so I remember Laura babysat Angelina when Angelina was two
and Laura was about eight,” Dern’s father Bruce said at the Motion Picture Academy’s
Governors Awards.
Thornton and Jolie’s relationship moved at lightning speed.
The newlyweds were never shy when it came to their relationship.
They would often walk the red carpet hand in hand while famously wearing vials of each
other’s blood around their necks.
“The necklaces were a very simple thing, ‘Hey, let’s poke our fingers with a pen
and smear a little blood on there and when we’re away from each other we’ll wear
the necklace.’
It was that easy,” he explained once on a podcast.
“But by the time it came out in the press, it sounded like we were wearing a bucket of
blood around our necks.”
Well, he’s not wrong.
Considering Thornton and Jolie’s marriage was his fifth, the Bad Santa actor didn’t
have the best track record with sticking to his vows.
Even his relationship with Jolie seemed to be doomed from the start.
He openly admitted to feeling insecure, revealing to GQ in 2016 that he “never felt good enough
for her,” and that he was unable to keep up with her glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle.
The passion quickly fizzled, and they split after two years of marriage.
“We just had different lifestyles,” Thornton said, elaborating on their differences.
“Hers is a global lifestyle, and mine is an agoraphobic lifestyle.
So, that’s really — that’s the only reason we’re probably not still together,
maybe, because of a different path in life we wanted to take.”
After calling things off with Jolie, he put the celebrity dating game behind him.
“I found celebrity to be difficult just because of privacy issues,” he said in 2017
about his A-list relationships.
In 2004, Thornton welcomed daughter Bella with makeup effects crew member Connie Angland.
The couple walked down the aisle ten year later, and they’re still going strong.
The actor has four kids from his six marriages.
Dern went on to marry musician Ben Harper in 2005, and they welcomed a son in 2001 and
a daughter in 2004.
The couple — who met at one of Harper’s concerts in 2000 — were married in a private
ceremony at their LA home in front of their kids and a small group of friends and family.
Five years later, the Grammy winner filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.
Their divorce was finalized in 2013.
While Dern has never directly addressed the breakdown of her marriage, she did make a
rare comment about divorce in 2019 when promoting her movie Marriage Story.
“As director Noah Baumbach) first said about the story when we first talked about it, he
said, ‘I want to tell a love story where endings are not failures.’
And that really moved me and struck me deeply,” Dern said, alluding to her separation and
that of her parents.
Surely, she wasn’t thinking of her separation from Thornton at the time.
“So, to my amazing divorced parents, and my amazing stepparents, and my amazing children
— who came from love despite an ending in a marriage — we’re so privileged to redefine
what family looks like.”
That’s all we have for you today, Juicers!
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