Angelina Jolie doesn’t act as much as she once did, but she’s still one of the biggest stars in the world. Seeing her now it’s impossible to see anything but a movie star, and that was apparently the case even before she was one. David Duchovny says that’s what he saw back when he “discovered” her for the film Playing God back in the late 1990s.
Unless you’re a serious fan of either Angelina Jolie or David Duchovny’s early attempts to break into film after making a name for himself on the X-Files, there’s a decent chance you’ve never seen 1997’s Playing God, which stars Duchovny as a doctor turned underworld surgeon. For some reason, it's one of those movies that's just been forgotten by time. Appearing on Radio Andy the actor says that when Angelina Jolie came into audition for the role of the female lead he insisted on casting her as he felt she was a star in the making. He explained…
I feel like I discovered Angelina Jolie. … Yeah, I was part of the casting – I didn’t discover her but… she came in, and I just knew she was a movie star, and I told everybody [that] we've gotta cast her.
Exactly when a new star is “discovered” is rarely perfectly clear, as Duchovny himself admits by saying that both he did and did not discover Jolie. He didn’t really discover Angelina Jolie, and yet, he feels like he did. The actress had some significant roles prior to Playing God, including most notably the early internet drama Hackers, but it seems Duchovny didn’t know who she was, so he felt like he was seeing something nobody else had seen before.
And maybe he’s right. If Jolie hadn’t gotten the role in Playing God perhaps it wouldn’t have given her the credibility or notoriety that helped her get other roles. It’s hard to imagine that Angelina Jolie wouldn’t have become a star eventually, as Duchovny said, he knew she was a movie star, but perhaps things wouldn’t have happened for her quite as fast as they did if he hadn’t “discovered” her.
At this point, Angelina Jolie may be better known to a generation of movie fans as the ex-wife of Brad Pitt. She’s certainly spent more of her time dealing with the legal ramifications of divorce, mostly ownership of a French winery, instead of being on the big screen. Still, when she does appear in a movie again she will automatically draw attention because she certainly is a movie star.
Jolie recently won a Tony Award, as one of the producers of the Broadway version of The Outsiders, with her previous Academy Award, she’s now halfway to an EGOT. Perhaps Jolie has even more worlds of entertainment left to conquer.
