Billy Bob Thornton’s marriage to Angelina Jolie was a "great time".
The 62-year-old actor was wed to the ‘Malificent’ actress – who has Maddox, 16, Pax, 14, Zahara, 13, Shiloh, 12, and nine-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne with estranged husband Brad Pitt – from 2000 to 2003 and though they are no longer together, the ‘Goliath’ star still considers his ex-wife a friend.
Speaking on the ‘HFPA In Conversation’ podcast, he said: "I look at that time as a great time.
"Angie is still a friend of mine and she’s a great person and she’s done so much. She makes movies that are important to her whether they succeed or fail, she still does what she believes in and I’ll always respect her for that."
The former couple famously wore necklaces containing vials of each other’s blood, but Billy Bob – who has 13-year-old daughter Bella with wife Connie Angland – insists their relationship wasn’t "crazy" and many factors of their romance were "exaggerated" in public.
He said: "A lot of the things they said about us at the time were exaggerated. It wasn’t as crazy as people wrote about it.
"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.
"But by the time it came out in the press it sounded like we were wearing a bucket of blood around our necks."
The ‘Fargo’ star thinks he and Angelina could have still been together if their "lifestyles" weren’t so different, with the 43-year-old beauty favouring travel, while he prefers to be at home.
He said: "We just had different lifestyles. 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. There was a different path in life we wanted to take."
Billy Bob Thornton praises Angelina Jolie
