According to Vanity Fair, the pair were still married when Jolie adopted her first son, Maddox, while Thornton was on tour with his band. Rumors started swirling that he was sleeping around, which he denied vehemently. At the time, Jolie quipped "I don't think [the rumors] are untrue," but that wasn't why they ultimately split up.

They ended up evolving as people, and finding out that they didn't have that much in common. In the same 2005 interview with Vanity Fair, she said, "In a year I became who I am today, very much, and he became who he is today." She continued, "It was just totally different paths in life, and then we just looked at each other one day and we had nothing to say to each other."

However, in 2003, Thornton gave his side of the story as to why they split to Entertainment Weekly. "I don't think either one of us knows why we split up." He continued with an analogy, "It was like, say you're going to a nightclub one night with your friends and you're in line and the next thing you know there are guys with helicopters and there's machine-gun fire and you don't know what happened. And that's kind of like what our breakup was like."