BREAKING NEWS: A celebrity said something about motherhood and nobody is upset about it.
When Angelina Jolie was asked what she thought of New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray’s comments about guilt and motherhood, she used it as an opportunity to acknowledge how lucky she is to be a rich movie star mom.
“I’m not a single mom with two jobs trying to get by every day,” she told the New York Daily News. “I have much more support than most people, most women in this world. And I have the financial means to have a home and health care and food.”
“When I feel I’m doing too much, I do less, if I can,” she said. “And that’s why I’m in a rare position where I don’t have to do job after job. I can take time when my family needs it.” Jolie stars in the upcoming Disney movie Maleficent, in which her daughter Vivienne Jolie-Pitt makes her acting debut.
Jolie was directly responding to the backlash to Chirlane McCray’s comments in New York Magazine this week about how it was difficult for her to adjust to motherhood:
“Especially with Chiara—will we feel guilt forever more? Of course, yes. But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reason not to do it. I love her. I have thousands of photos of her—every 1-month birthday, 2-month birthday. But I’ve been working since I was 14, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.”
McCray’s insight doesn’t seem so crazy — it seems pretty understandable, actually — and the rest of the piece detailed how she had stopped working for several years after she had her second child to care for him and her mother and her mother-in-law both of whom moved in with the de Blasio family. But that didn’t stop the New York Post from taking advantage of that moment of candor to put a screaming “I was a bad mom” headline next to McCray’s face on their cover.
Jolie may have been asked about McCray, but in her answer she’s offering a direct contrast to statements by Gwyneth Paltrow, who got slammed for telling E! movie stars have it harder than moms who work office jobs.
“I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening. When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.”
Paltrow’s tone-deaf comments sparked even more outrage than McCray’s, and caused working moms everywhere to ridicule her ridiculous notion that filming one movie a year is harder than working a steady job.
MORE: Gwyneth’s Mom Problem
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- Behind the Scenes of The White Lotus Season Three
- How Trump 2.0 Is Already Sowing Confusion
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- We’re Lucky to Have Been Alive in the Age of David Lynch
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Column: All Those Presidential Pardons Give Mercy a Bad Name
Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com