Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt Discuss Marriage, New Film, Cancer Fight | TODAY

It's been a little more than a year now since two of the biggest superstars in Hollywood, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, got married. NBC's Tom Brokaw recently caught up with them. Tom, good morning. Good to see you. Good morning. Good to be back. We got together with the newlyweds at the iconic Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles, not too far from their home. I talked to them about their new marriage, how they have rewritten the celebrity guidebook on managing fame, and how life's obstacles, especially for Angelina, have brought them Despite their worldwide superstardom, they sometimes seem just like another married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, or Smith. So now you're a married couple, you know, it's certified. And Angie told me that shortly after you got married, she thought maybe she should be a more conventional wife and mother and thought about cooking. This is the best part about it, he looks at me, he's like, every three months I'll say, honey, I think I should learn how to cook. Don't I? Yeah. I just humor it. But really, she has no business in the kitchen. Their domestic life aside, it turns out the way this celebrity couple celebrated their nuptials was by going back to work together on the screen for the first time in 10 years, a film produced by our sister company, Universal Pictures, By the Seed. What's cooking, good looking? In which Angelina not only stars, she's the writer, director, and producer. This is a much different film than Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Little bit. The last time you appeared. Little bit. We were joking at one point, we were saying like, oh, this is going to be compared to this is the beginning, and then this is 10 years later. This is what 10 years of marriage will do to you. Come on. Please don't. Do it. Stop! I don't want to give away too much about the film, By the Seed, but I think a lot of your fans and other moviegoers are going to be a little surprised by some things. Here you have one of the most secure marriages in Hollywood, and this is about the two of you in a deeply troubled marriage. Was this a big risk on your part? Well, I think, one, I'm counting on the audience to know that if it was close to us at all, we could never make this film. It's because we're actually very, very stable, and these aren't our issues. I'm blowing you a kiss. By the Sea, which seems more like a European art film than a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, is a deeply personal project. It was inspired by her own bereavement and grief after dealing with her mother's eight-year battle with cancer. I can't say what the whole film is about, but a lot of the film was when I went to visit But my mom in the hospital, when she found out she had cancer the first time, she was going to have her ovaries removed. She was very upset and feeling like they were taking out her parts that were female. And there was a woman down the hall who was wailing. And I later found out it was a young woman who had not had children yet. And that put everything into perspective. Angelina's mother, the actress Marjolaine Bertrand, was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999 at 49 and died in 2007, this following the deaths of Angelina's grandmother and maternal aunt, also because of a cancer. A few years ago, a blood test revealed that Angelina carried a mutation of a BRCA1 gene, giving her an estimated 87% risk of breast cancer, a 50% risk of ovarian cancer. So in 2013, she had both breasts removed and underwent reconstructive surgery, emerging as a beacon of hope for women when she told the world. I feel wonderful and I'm very, very grateful for all the support. It's meant a lot to me. Have you been stunned by the reaction to this? And are there parts of it that are worrisome to you? You never know what a reaction is. You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believe they were right for me. Then in March of this year, while she was editing By the Sea, her doctor called with news that another blood test showed she could have signs of early ovarian cancer. She called Brad right away. I was out in France and Angie called me and I got straight on a plane to return. Seeing my wife have to be her strongest and knowing that it's the scariest of news is terribly moving. And not being there is a horrible feeling. Together, they faced a crisis. And although it ended up she did not have a full-blown tumor, she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Throughout the ordeal, her mother was never far from her thoughts. We had some of the same nurses, some of the same doctors. So the doctor that did my ovary surgery was my mother's doctor. My mother had said to her, promise me you will take Angie's ovaries out. And so when we kind of got together, we both had a big cry and she said, I promised your mother I got to do this. Less than two weeks after her procedure, she wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times to make other women aware of what they might expect if they face the same issues. In Angelina's case, despite hormonal replacement therapy, her ovarian surgery brought on an early onset of menopause. Every woman is different when they go through menopause and every woman is. And I didn't know emotionally how I would feel. I knew the breast would be a bigger surgery and physically changing. The ovaries is more your hormones changing and your emotions changing. But it's different. You feel different. For Brad, Angelina's surgeries and medical challenges these past few years have been inspirational. But she had to make big decisions about double mastectomy and then about having her ovaries removed. How did you see your role in all that? Support. Whatever's got to be done to keep the family together and keep the family together as long as possible is going to be done. No question, it's a scary decision and there's many things that can go wrong and go many different directions. But it was really led by her dedication of this is what I've got to do and this is what I'm going to do. Did you have an appreciation of the emotional part of it? I just remembered there was no vanity to my wife's approach. It was mature, there was an excitement to where this is our life and we're going to make the best of it. There was a strength in that. It's just another one of those things in life that makes you tighter. She was doing it for her kids and she was doing it for her family. So we could be together was trumped everything, trumped everything and anything. I think for as much as he speaks about my strength, I knew that he made it very, very clear to me that what he loved and what was a woman to him was somebody who was smart and capable and cared about her family, that it wasn't about, it's not about your physical body. And so I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn't something where I was going to feel less of a woman because my husband wasn't going to let that happen. And in the long run, Angelina now thinks her experiences might help others. Many of us will have cancer. We will all die. And so to face these issues together and speak about them and talk about what it is to be human, I think can be a beautiful thing. As you know, Hollywood is not my natural arena, but the fact is I'm very taken with these two because of their honesty. They didn't try to, uh, in some way to engage me in a way that would improve on their careers. I think her message is very important to women all over the world, quite honestly. And they were going from here, by the way, back to his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, where he has a compound on a lake. We're going to spend the week with his aunts and uncles and cousins and other people and then retreat to their very private lives, except when they have something important to say. So hats off to the two of them. Hollywood might not be your thing, but people are your strong suit. And that was a great interview. It really was. Thank you. I do, I do admire their honesty and what she does is going to be critically important downstream to young women coming of age and not being afraid to make the decisions that are very hard. And showing how to make them with such grace as well. Tom, thank you very much. We should mention, by the way, their movie, By the Sea, from our sister company, Universal, will be in theaters on November 13th. over here to watch the latest interviews, show highlights and digital exclusives.