Angela Jolie Denies Claims About Controversial Child-Casting Processes

Angelina Jolie says accounts of her casting process for children to appear in her film “First They Killed My Father” are false and upsetting. An excerpt from a Vanity Fair profile of the director sparked backlash online earlier this week from people who criticized the methods as being cruel and exploitative.

Adapted from Loung Ung’s memoir, the biographical drama centers on her childhood under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Jolie co-wrote and directed the film, which she talked about in a recent Vanity Fair profile.

The article described a scene in which casting directors in their attempt to find a child actress to play the lead role presented money to impoverished children only to take it away from them as an acting exercise.

Jolie and producer Rithy Panh issued joint statements Sunday responding to the outrage and refuting claims that the production was exploitative through a representative from Netflix, which is producing and distributing the film.

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario. The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting,” Jolie said. “I would be outraged myself if this had happened.”

Read the rest of this article at Page Six.

Angelina Jolie has appeared in Maleficent.