Angelina Jolie’s new film 'Couture' mirrors her personal health struggles

Angelina Jolie’s 'Couture' follows director facing breast cancer diagnosis while working during Paris Fashion Week

Angelina Jolie’s upcoming drama Couture explores a storyline that has clear parallels with her own medical history, as the actress portrays a film director who receives a breast cancer diagnosis while working during Paris Fashion Week.

In the trailer for Alice Winocour’s Couture, Jolie plays Maxine, a director tasked with creating an opening film for a high-profile runway show.

While managing the demands of a fashion shoot and interacting with models, she is given life-changing news that she has breast cancer.

“You spend life preparing for all these things to happen,” Maxine says in the trailer amidst a montage of doctor appointments efforts to complete her fashion show short film. “And then the thing you never saw coming, there it is.”

The trailer also shows Maxine asking her doctor whether she might die, to which he responds, “Everybody's going to die.”

The role echoes Jolie’s real-life health decisions after she revealed in a 2013 New York Times op-ed titled My Medical Choice that she tested positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation, significantly increasing her risk of breast cancer. Following this, she underwent an elective double mastectomy.

“I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy,” Jolie wrote at the time. “But it is one I am very happy that I made.