Jumping off a high-rise while wearing black dominatrix gear and sky-high stiletto heels? It's all in a day's work for Angelina Jolie.

But navigating her way around a kitchen? That presented a bigger problem for the domestically challenged actress, who plays a bored assassin/housewife in the comedic thriller Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It opens Friday.

"Angie does not have the homemaker thing going," Akiva Goldsman, a producer on the movie, says with a laugh. "There's a scene where she kicks the oven door closed behind her. I showed her how to do that. She looked at me as though I had showed her that you could create gold out of thin air. The idea that you could kick an oven door closed was entirely alien to her."

It's vintage Jolie, who at 30 is nothing if not a comely cluster of contradictions.

The tattooed former wild child -- who in her younger years battled an eating disorder and self-mutilation and later famously wore a necklace containing a drop of her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood -- has evolved into a vocal and hands-on celebrity goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Today, the smoldering beauty is equally at home visiting the displaced in eastern Jordan, hobnobbing with global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or posing on the red carpet in a clingy Celine dress. She is now by all accounts the doting single mom of adopted son Maddox, 3, but acknowledges being a woman who takes lovers when it suits her. And she has been branded a homewrecker in the tabloids for her did-they, didn't-they relationship with Brad Pitt, who plays her assassin husband in Smith.