Maddox Jolie-Pitt made Angelina Jolie a first-time parent when she adopted him as a 7-month-old baby from a Cambodian orphanage in 2002. Today, he is a handsome and intelligent young man, who is studying biochemistry in college.
Angelina’s wild-child image totally changed once she became a mom to Maddox. She brought him everywhere, even to Hollywood movie premieres, where she would carry her young son in her arms. The pair were featured prominently in a Vanity Fair spread on the single mother and her beloved son. She gushed to the publication, “He’s made me a woman. He’s the greatest thing to ever happen to my life.”
In 2006, one year into Angelina’s new relationship with Brad Pitt, the Fight Club actor adopted Maddox, with the boy taking on the surname Jolie-Pitt. The pair went on to have five more children, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne. Angelina and Brad married in August 2014, but she filed for divorce in September 2016.
Maddox has always been so close and protective of his mother. The pair worked together when she directed the 2017 film First They Killed My Father, based on the late 1970s genocide in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge came to power. Although he was only 16 years old at the time, Maddox took on an executive producer credit and spent the entire four-month film shoot in Cambodia with Angelina, assisting with the production.
“Mad knows himself very well, and if he said he was ready, I knew he knew,” Angelina told People magazine in 2017. “He goes back and forth [to Cambodia] a lot, but this would be over four months of just being in the country, really reading, listening, learning and absorbing all things about his culture and country [including] the very, very dark parts.”
In the same interview, Maddox said how “proud” he was to hail from the Southeast Asian nation. When asked about his favorite part of shooting the film in Cambodia, he responded, “The people by far. [They are] calm, relaxed, and when they want to do something wild, they do it — much like me in a way. I’m proud to be a Cambodian.”
Maddox also inherited Angelina love of piloting an airplane, by taking flying lessons. “He’s quite capable and always takes me by surprise,” Angelina gushed to the publication. “He’s been practicing flying, then they called me the other day and said, ‘So, Mad can go solo,’ and I nearly dropped the phone!”
Angelina’s eldest son is also multilingual. “He’s been taking French and Russian and all these different languages. I hear him talking in full, fluent French, and they’ll tell me he’s reached a certain level in his German, and I have no idea. He doesn’t do it in front of me,” she revealed in the interview.
When it came time for Maddox’s higher education, Angelina and her son toured the campuses of New York University and the University of Chicago. Ultimately, Mad chose to go overseas, where he is attending Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. The intelligent young man is studying biochemistry. He took up learning the Korean language before leaving for school in the late summer of 2019, so that he would be able to proficiently communicate with his professors and classmates.
Click through the gallery below to see Maddox Jolie-Pitt today.