Angelina's Complex Answer To Playing Multi-Racial

In "A Mighty Heart", Angelina Jolie gives a gut-wrenching performance as Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Moments into the movie, the audience forgets it's Angelina at all and she more than lives up to her Oscar-winning hype. She's also a fair skinned white woman with blue/gray eyes playing an Afro Cuban/Dutch woman, a transformation eased with a wig, dark brown contact lenses and her make-up artist. The cross-racial casting left some upset, with criticisms ranging from, "It rubs me wrong" to it being a "new generation of Hollywood in blackface".

It's been well-documented that Mariane wanted Angelina to play her, asked her personally, and the two have become good friends. At the junket at the Waldorf Astoria last Friday, HuffPost was one of six outlets at a 20-minute round table with the actress, and asked, "Were you nervous playing someone multiracial?" Angelina fixed her eyes, fiddled with the $15,000 Cartier watch on her wrist, and answered:

The idea is, if you ask Mariane, because she did address that, and if you did actually want to find somebody that was her exact makeup, she's actually majority Dutch, and she's as black as she is Chinese, and she's Cuban, and she's French. So, it could have gone to many different racial backgrounds, probably, if you went technical on it. And that, you know, is a reality. At the same time, to her, the importance was the essence of her spiritually, and I think that was what mattered and I think that is a question to ask her. But no, if you break down the DNA, it's very complex.

And nobody accuses anything Angelina does of being simple.