Earlier on in her career, notably as Girl, Interrupted’s entertainingly feral Lisa, we tended to think of Angelina Jolie as dangerous. These days, we’re more inclined to think of her as unafraid. Perhaps that’s because she has stayed on her own course despite career reversals (2003’s Beyond Borders was one from the heart that flopped; this year’s Taking Lives was one for the bucks that did likewise) and shown a knack for calmly living out personal traumas (her feuding with her dad, her tumultuous breakup with Billy Bob Thornton) in public.

In recent months, the tabloid press has tried to link her with both costar Colin Farrell and director Oliver Stone as she shot Alexander, rumors she laughingly addresses below. Farrell calls her “a very special woman who brought an amazing, otherworldly energy to [her role],” and Stone calls her “ravishing—out of this world,” but off-camera, Jolie, 29, is very much of this world: grounded, cordially workmanlike, and, for all the exoticism of her looks, a clear-eyed, articulate presence.

Though she’s a woman who’s proven very adept at flying through the air on cables in slam-bang action sequences, Jolie is more striking, and all the more herself, in moments of stillness. At the afternoon photo shoot on a locked-down soundstage in Queens, she used that remarkable stillness wisely. She was pure aplomb in dealing with a wall of flame (see cover), and if anything, was even calmer when two elegant but fearsome-looking leopards were brought in by their handlers.

PREMIERE had proposed that in keeping with our notion of Jolie as a woman not prone to intimidation, we would have some kind of potentially predatory creature on hand. We proposed dogs; Jolie countered with the wish for wild animals, thus the leopard. A couple of hours later, in a hotel dining room on Central Park South, with her three-year-old adopted son, Maddox, sleeping upstairs, and police cruisers noisily running drills outside, our talk begins with the big cat.

This article was originally published in the October 2004 issue of PREMIERE magazine.