Angelina Jolie credits her almost-grown kids for getting her "fighting spirit" back

Angelina Jolie sat down with Variety's Marc Malkin to promote her new film "Couture," and somewhere between the questions about the movie she said the thing everyone ended up quoting.

"I think my fighting spirit is finally back. I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it's coming back in large part thanks to my children, who are now older, and encouraging it."

She handed that over without much fuss. The woman who spent the back half of the 2010s in a public, messy divorce from Brad Pitt is telling a reporter she feels like herself again, and she is giving the credit to her kids.

The nearly-empty nest is doing her a favor

Jolie has six children with Pitt: Maddox (24), Pax (22), Zahara (21), Shiloh (20), and 17-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne. By her own math, "my kids are almost all 18," and the near-adults in the house apparently have opinions about their mother's social calendar.

"Now they want to see me traveling the world, they want me to get out and do things," she told Variety. "They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot."

That last line only lands if you have raised teenagers. Respect.

She framed the whole thing as getting back to parts of herself she had filed away. "They're very encouraging of me kind of getting back to aspects of myself that maybe I hadn't felt as free to do," she said.

So, is she dating?

No, and she has been clear about it. Jolie told Yahoo Entertainment in an interview published June 22 that she has not dated since the split, and E! and Parade both ran with her explanation that her focus has been on her kids and family instead of romance. She has been single since the 2016 breakup that kicked off one of the longer celebrity legal sagas of the decade, and she is not in a rush to change that.

The punk question

Malkin asked whether she considers herself punk, because her "Couture" director Alice Winocour had described her as having "punk spirit." Jolie's answer was better than the question deserved.

"I think I'm more punk now," she said. Then she filed privacy itself under punk: "Sometimes the doing less, or being private, when the world is the way it is right now, that is an opposite."

The part that is not a press junket

In "Couture," Jolie plays a horror director who gets a breast cancer diagnosis in the middle of a divorce. The role rhymes with her real life in a way she did not dodge. Jolie revealed in a 2013 New York Times op-ed that she had a preventive double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene. Her mother died of ovarian cancer at 56. A long life has never felt like a given to her.

"I have never lived feeling like I'm going to have a long life," she told Variety. "I'm already past the age when my mother was diagnosed." She said she raises her kids "almost preparing them for my absence and not as much preparing to be a grandmother."

That is a heavy thing to say in a movie interview, and she said it plainly. It also explains why the "fighting spirit" line reads as a bigger deal than a press-tour soundbite. When someone has spent years bracing, wanting to go do things again is not a small turn.

"Couture" reached US theaters on June 26.