What is it like being married to the most beautiful woman in the world? Not easy, at least according to Billy Bob Thornton, the actor and Oscar-winning screenwriter who was married to Jolie from 2000 to 2003. Though the difficulty was no fault of Jolie’s, Thornton is quick to clarify, as much as it was his constant feeling of insecurity related to her many humanitarian accomplishments and aspirations.

“I never felt good enough for her,” Thornton admits to GQ in a new interview, explaining that he was more comfortable watching sports at home while she was out and about, meeting with politicians, other do-gooders, and adoption agencies. And Jolie never made him feel bad about his more modest aspirations. The bigger problem, Thornton explains, was that “I’m real uncomfortable around rich and important people.” And he had no desire to change his ways—“I like how I am.”

Even though they have been divorced for over a decade, Thornton explains that he and Jolie are still on good terms. (He even still has both tattoos of Jolie’s name, though one is slightly covered. “He and Angie are still friends, though, he says,” writes GQ’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in a lovely epilogue that is rare for Hollywood marriages. “They talk every few months, she’s just so busy with the kids and work and the many houses in the many countries, but the minute they connect it’s like old times (minus phlebotomy and face gnawing).”

In Jolie’s 2005 Vanity Fair cover story, the actress reflected on the marriage to Nancy Jo Sales.

They had met on the set of Pushing Tin, in which they played an eccentric married couple. And then they became one, making for a media carnival. Here were Mr. and Mrs. Thornton with pendants of each other’s dried blood around their necks; here they were, arriving disheveled to an awards ceremony as Thornton explained, “We just [bleeped] in the limo on the way to the show,” a quote which will probably follow him to his obituary.

She said she didn’t speak to him for a year and a half after leaving him, in 2002. “We finally kind of talked and purged. I wasn’t planning on talking. But maybe ‘cause we’re both artists, and he’s a writer, he’s very in touch with ways to express something, so he was able to call and say, This is what I understand about you and me, about life, and this friendship.

“He’s a really good man,” she said. “He’s hysterical—we had a lot of laughs. Probably one of the reasons I loved him so much is I don’t giggle that much, and we met as two people who had been through pain and addiction”—she has said “heroin has been very close to me in my life”—“and life and just drama and deep inside ourselves and we got together and just started laughing.

“What went wrong, or not even wrong,” she said, “but what wasn’t meant to be was he was focusing on his music”—in Slash’s old studio in their basement—“and I was upstairs reading. I went through a change in my life and started paying more attention to the news and learning about other countries and becoming more politically active.”

To read the complete profile of Angelina Jolie, click here.