Hollywood doesn’t always deal in beauty and glamour. Sometimes, usually around the end of the year when Oscar voters start paying attention, they get serious. The Good Shepherd is one such year-end film, chronicling the birth of the CIA and all the dirty dealings, torture and personal deception it required.

It’s a lot easier to deal with such things when it’s lovely folks like Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie delivering the news. He plays the fictional character Edward Wilson, who turns paranoia and suspicion into tools of his trade. To do this, he lets secrets ruin his marriage to Clover (Jolie), who cannot stop him from embracing the dark path of espionage.

When I met them, there was nothing dark about the actors’ appearances. In New York to do interviews on behalf of the film, Jolie fought through a mob of photographers outside midtown’s Regency Hotel but appeared not only unscathed, but ravishing. A wavy hair style hung to her shoulders, framing the bone structure that sets her face apart from the rest of ours. A full length beige skirt and white sweater seemed conservative enough for the ‘50s setting of the film, but it came to life hugging her curves.

As for Damon, he looked just like the sort of Ivy League guy that Wilson is when he begins his journey into government work. Wearing jeans and a dark gray sweater, Damon munched on a bag of popcorn, probably having to squeeze any eating he could into a busy day of publicity.

Both exuded the confidence that comes from being comfortable in one’s own skin. They are not burdened by the secret identities that tear their characters apart, nor would they consider being secretive in a marriage. “I think quite the opposite is the only thing that works,” said Jolie. “I don’t want to spend my life having to pretend to be somebody else. And I don’t want the person next to me to have to pretend, ever, because we have a long life ahead of us. So you want to just be able to be who you are in every moment, and that’s the only way you’ll ever be truly happy anyway.”

It’s hard to hide anything when every media conglomerate in the world is chronicling your every move, even combining your names in catchy ways like “Brangelina.” Jolie married Brad Pitt, who she met on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, filmed in 2004. Now their family may prohibit a reunion film. “Who’s going to watch the children?” joked Jolie.

Matt Damon married a waitress he met in Miami on location for the film Stuck on You. He had his own first baby with Luciana Barroso last summer, as well as step-fathering her first daughter.

”I feel I got made a member of a club I didn’t know existed,” Damon said of parenting. “It’s just wonderful. Other people’s babies, they were always showing me baby pictures or trying to hand me the baby, and I was like, ‘Get that thing away from me. I don’t want to touch your kid. Give me a break.’ But I’m totally into it now. I was scared at first because I was kind of excited for my daughter to be two. I was excited for her to start talking and walking and toddling around and hanging out, but I didn’t realize how much personality little people have right off the bat. It’s just been fun.”

Jolie had adopted her first son, Maddox, while she was filming Beyond Borders in Africa in 2003. He was born in Cambodia. Two years later, she and Pitt adopted a daughter, Zahara from Ethiopia. Last year, Jolie had Pitt’s child, Shiloh, while visiting Africa.

A Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations, working with refugees of war torn countries, Jolie involves her whole family in philanthropy. “I will continue to work with refugees, and I will never shift focus from them because I think it’s important, and it is where my heart lies,” she said. “Cambodia, we just went back there and it’s changed so much over the years. It is now ‘Millennium Village’ that Brad and I are supporting. It’s also 148,000 acres of protected forest, and it’s also many, many villagers, and it’s huge. A huge, huge project, which is not what I intended. But it’s wonderful, and I’m learning a lot.”

She continues, “We’re involved in many things, [including] Brad’s work in New Orleans. We’re just trying to make sure we always stay focused because our temptation is to just, we hear something that’s going on, and we want to get involved. We’re working together on AIDS orphans and passing some legislation for them on their behalf, because there’s no one actually fighting for them. So we’ve put together a group of people that will do exactly that. For Zahara as well, we want to do something in Ethiopia supporting an orphanage there, but I think we will figure out something specific. Maddox will take over his project [in Cambodia and] we want her to take over hers. So we have to figure out what that is.”

Damon is currently working on translating his daughter’s baby talk into language that journalists can quote. “You can either give her [a zurburt kiss] on the stomach or you can munch under her arm, and she goes ‘Eheheh, eheheh, eheheheheheheh.’ It’s just the funniest. She sounds like a little machine gun.”

While their lives may be open books to the public, as weekly magazines publish photos of their daily activities, the stars struggle to maintain whatever facets of normalcy they can. “I’ve made a point to not let it change the way I live my life,” Jolie said. “Other than I carefully plan my holidays or where we go, or where we stay or things like that, to try and ensure some kind of quality of life that’s private and nice for the kids. But we simply don’t let it effect us. I think the only time it is hard is when the kids want to go somewhere. I’ve had so many people offer to take my children to Disneyland or places that I can’t take them, and they don’t understand how upsetting that is. So we plan to find ways to do all of those things. And there are worse problems [in the world].”

Damon witnessed such things firsthand when he saw Jolie come to work every day. A co-star of her husband’s in the Ocean’s Eleven movies, dodging the limelight seems to be a family business. “[They have] this unbelievable extra thing that they bring with them which I wouldn’t wish upon anybody, which is camped outside the hotel right now. 25 to 50 photographers just waiting because she’s in this building,” he said. “That would happen [when] we were shooting at the armory over in Brooklyn. I’d know when she was working because I’d come to work and there would be all these people there. But once we were inside, she and Brad both have this unbelievable ability, they just leave it. They just leave it behind them. We’d get into rehearsals and she was so good in this movie and so different from anything that she’d done. I don’t know how she handles that stuff. I definitely just couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

Luckily, Damon doesn’t have to fend off the hordes as often. “Actually, I don’t have a very hard time keeping my private life private,” he said. “There’s not that much interest.”

Holidays like Halloween make it easier for the Jolie-Pitts to take their kids out. They can just go incognito. “I was just going to do a mix of odd masks and things,” she recalled of October ‘06. “This year we were in India, so we had this really odd celebration in the hotel. We just had candy and costumes sent up from the States, so Brad had a really big Afro and I had dreadlocks. We were trying to explain to them what it was, but really we just had fun with dress up.”

Brad, travel, charity, kids, saving the world and movies. Angelina Jolie does more in one year than most women do their entire lives. “I plan a lot, obsessively. I’m very, very lucky. I love the different elements in my life and I love working abroad, and I love being with my kids and I love being with Brad, so this is the life I chose to have and I’d like to add many more children and many more obstacles and many more things.”

Damon focuses on maintaining his career. With a successful blockbuster franchise in The Bourne action movies, he has taken risks with films like The Good Shepherd and Syriana. Even The Departed, this fall’s biggest surprise hit and now an Oscar contender, was intended to be another Martin Scorsese art house film.

Though his fans believe he can do anything, Damon is aware of Hollywood realities. “I have a real limited chance to choose certain movies and I’m happy with the choices so far, because I think they’re a little more challenging. And it doesn’t last forever. You guys see everybody come and go. I know the deal. I’ve been around. It’s like you breathe this rarefied air for a real short time and then there’s an ebb and flow to everything. Particularly with the choices I make and the material I tend to be drawn to, I can’t be up here for long. I’ve just always been very, very cautious because it doesn’t last.”

”I’ve just never wanted to get swept up in it because then you get lazy or you start making safer bets or you start to try to protect your beachhead and that’s kind of a recipe for disaster. And I think it’s healthy to look at it as something that is kind of always in transition, because that is the way that the industry is looking at its actors. We are like commodities kind of. It’s not something you should take for granted because it’s not by any kind of right that it’s going to be there. You really have to keep proving to the financiers that people want to see you in movies or they just won’t bankroll the movies.”