Writing for a man, then swapping gender, is, as it turns out, the best way to create an utterly liberated hero, a character with none of the tropes that writers, even if they don’t mean to, fall back on when creating a role for a woman. “You think it would be easy [to change],” Jolie told me. “You just flip the character from Edwin to Edwina. But it was a lot trickier than we thought.” ...For those of you who didn't pick up a hard copy of the mag, here's the cover story/interview (Aug. 2010). Enjoy!
In the end, the role seems like part of Jolie’s greater project: to combine beauty with a Harrison Ford—like physicality. In action movie after action movie, she has played against type, creating a new type in the process. Political without being political, she’s a stealth feminist, expanding gender roles from the inside, taking the blockbuster male lead and adding a vowel to the end of the character’s first name, “Edwin to Edwina.” In a larger sense, it’s less about gender than about power, control. It’s something Jolie seemed to understand from her earliest films: no one admires a lady in distress, no matter how beautiful. Domination is the thing, revenge, the sound of the guns.
Read the full article here.
