Gwen Stefani says Angelina Jolie ‘beat’ her to Mr and Mrs Smith role

‘That could have gone a whole different way,’ TV host Ellen Degeneres said

Gwen Stefani has discussed how she almost played the Jane to Brad Pitt’s John in 2005 action-romance film Mr and Mrs Smith.

The role was, of course, taken by Angelina Jolie, who went on to marry Pitt in 2014.

Stefani, who has a number of film credits to her name including The Aviator (2004), revealed she went up for Doug Limon's hit movie about a spy couple while appearing on The Ellen Show Thursday.

During the show’s popular Burning Questions segment, host Ellen Degeneres asked Stefani: “What movie role have you auditioned for that people would be surprised to know?”

The singer responded, “Mr and Mrs. Smith: Angelina beat me,” which drew gasps from the studio audience. “That could have gone a whole different way,” Degeneres remarked. “Talk about sliding doors.”

The movie, which took $487m (£373m) at the worldwide box office, became a tabloid sensation as rumours of an affair between the two stars circulated while Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston.

Aniston and Pitt divorced the year of the movie’s release, in 2005, and both Pitt and Jolie later confirmed that they had formed a romantic connection on the set.

In a 2006 interview with Vogue, Jolie admitted: “We just became kind of a pair. And it took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realise that it might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe.”

Pitt and Jolie went on to have six children together, three of whom were adopted internationally, before filing for divorce in 2016.