Tuesday, August 11, 2026

NOLA

A long simmering lawsuit against actor Brad Pitt’s post-Katrina neighborhood development Make It Right is back before a New Orleans judge this week, after a multimillion-dollar settlement to pay homeowners for shoddy construction didn’t come through. Now, the homeowners are seeking class-action status to get what they believe they’re owed.

Make It Right homeowners, who purchased their properties from the non-profit organization founded by the Hollywood leading man, first sued in 2018 for critical design and construction flaws, breach of contract, and fraud.

The case has yet to be resolved despite a settlement in 2022, when Global Green, a Los Angeles-based environmental organization, offered $20.5 million to compensate the homeowners on Make It Right's behalf.

Trouble was, Global Green didn’t have the money. The lawsuit was derailed for almost three years thereafter.

On Monday, lawyers began debating the situation anew in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, at a hearing to determine whether to certify a class action for the plaintiff homeowners.

There’s little argument that the homes Make It Right built were leaky and prone to rot. After all, in 2018 the organization sued its own managing architect for allegedly allowing poor building practices to take place.


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Monday, August 10, 2026







The Oscar-winning filmmaker tells PEOPLE why adapting Alessandro Baricco’s novel felt deeply personal and praises Salma Hayek’s “incredible work”

By Angelique Brenes Published on August 10, 2026 11:02AM EDT

Angelina Jolie is giving fans a new glimpse at Without Blood, and opening up about the deeply personal story she hopes audiences take with them.

Ahead of the film’s Sept. 18 theatrical release, the Oscar-winning filmmaker exclusively tells PEOPLE that her drama, starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir, is ultimately about “healing after trauma” and finding connection through honest conversation.

“I was drawn to Alessandro Baricco’s beautifully written novel because it examines universal truths about conflict, memory and what it is to be human,” Jolie, 51, tells PEOPLE of adapting the author’s acclaimed novel. “I chose to stay very true to it. My approach was to shape and edit more than to write.”

She says the story’s message extends far beyond its setting.

“The film is for anyone who seeks answers and healing after trauma,” Jolie says. “The book discusses how we often ‘return to where we break.’ That’s true for almost anyone. No one knows what someone else has gone through. To sit and talk with openness and honesty, is a beginning.”

The film also marks another collaboration between Jolie and Hayek, who previously starred alongside one another in Marvel’s Eternals. This time, however, Jolie is behind the camera directing her friend in what she says is one of the actress’ most transformative performances.

“It was wonderful,” Jolie tells PEOPLE. “I felt very fortunate to direct Salma, Demián and the rest of the cast and crew who worked incredibly hard.”

She says the emotionally demanding material required every actor to be fearless.

“It’s a very challenging piece for actors who had to be very brave and emotionally open,” Jolie says. “Knowing her well helped to direct her but there was so much about her as a woman and a performer I was surprised by still and so impressed.”

Jolie believes audiences will discover a side of Hayek they’ve never seen before.

“I am excited for people to see her incredible work,” she says. “To see her in a way she hasn’t been seen before.”

Without Blood, which Jolie directed and produced, is based on Baricco’s novel of the same name. Starring Hayek, Bichir and Juan Minujín, the drama unfolds in the aftermath of an unnamed conflict and explores themes of war, memory, trauma and healing.

The project has been years in the making. When production was underway in Italy in 2022, it also became a family affair.

At the time, Jolie’s sons Maddox and Pax worked behind the scenes in the assistant director department on the set. Reflecting on the experience, Jolie told PEOPLE, “We work well together. When a film crew is at its best, it feels like a big family, so it felt natural.”

Now, with Without Blood finally set to reach audiences, Jolie hopes viewers leave with the same sense of empathy that first drew her to the novel.

“No one knows what someone else has gone through,” she tells PEOPLE. “To sit and talk with openness and honesty, is a beginning.”


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Esquire

A Monday with Brad Pitt

The 62-year-old has lived a singular life. He resides in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all movie stars, not only today but ever, as measured by any metric you like, including intrigue. What does he have to say about all of it?

By Ryan D'Agostino, Photographs by Chantal Anderson, and Styling by George CortinaPublished: Aug 10, 2026

The dogs are trying to escape, shoving their noses through his knees and climbing all over each other attempting to paw their way out the glass door. He’s got it open just a few inches and is trying to calm them.

The whole entryway is solid glass, a tall plate-glass door flanked by tall plate-glass windows, or walls, so the whole scene is visible: him gently motioning for the dogs to sit, his mouth moving as he shushes them, them scampering around at his feet. Then he hollers across the driveway through the crack in the door: “You’ll get mildly molested for a couple of minutes, then they’ll leave you alone.”

He’s wearing a T-shirt the color of egg yolk over a bright-white T-shirt, gold parachute pants that shimmer, and white sneakers. It’s somehow pretty much the coolest outfit ever.

In the foyer, the two doodles, Sundae (“as in hot fudge”) and Vandy (“came with the name”), do as he said they would, their nails tapping the tile floor as they dance around sniffing and panting. They’re well-behaved, and he is attentive, holding their collars to chill them out.

When the dogs are satisfied, or no longer interested, that’s when he holds out his hand and says, by way of introduction, “Hey! Brad.” As he says this, he cocks his head back just a click, and his famous golden hair sways, and he smiles his smile, the one that makes you wonder what he’s discovered about the world that you haven’t.

On the kitchen island, which is the size of some small kitchens, he goes to work. He unwraps a wedge of yellow Gouda from its supermarket shrink-wrap and slices almost the whole thing, arranging the slices neatly on a board. Then he goes after a chunk of Parmesan the same way. (People will ask later, “Was there someone helping him? Like staff?” There was not. There was Brad Pitt in his kitchen slicing cheese.)

He opens two varieties of cracker: one that resembles Wheat Thins but is better and those crispy dark-brown ones with dried cranberries or something in them. Then he unsheathes a salami from its plastic casing and slices that up too. It’s black on the outside, encrusted in black pepper.

“I was cutting one of these up last week and I walked away for a minute. Came back? Gone. The whole sausage,” he says as he nods toward Sundae. “And no problem, either. But I gave this one a breath mint after, which she needed, and right away there was just, like, trails of vomit. You know the kind that’s hard to clean up? Like finger paint?”

He carries the charcuterie board and the basket of crackers to a table at the far end of the room, past the island’s acreage, past the cozy sitting area in front of the gas fireplace (which is on), by the glass doors that open onto the patio around the pool and the palm trees he bought and had planted around the pool (“because I’m a tree freak”) and, beyond that, the endless city. He bought this home in Los Angeles last fall. He has spent a total of three sporadic weeks in it.

“Guests get the view, that’s the rule,” he says, motioning to a seat for me. He retrieves two small bottles of Perrier from the fridge and grabs us each a paper towel because he doesn’t know where the napkins are. He brings plates, thick ceramic, bright blue with a happy design of interlocking white lines.

I’m getting the royal treatment, I tell him.

“Just another day at the Pitts’,” he says.

He awoke this morning on his own time, no alarm. What time? He laughs, a quick a-ha laugh. “Well, see, it doesn’t matter! The point is, it’s such a luxury,” he says. He read the news for a bit on his phone. He played a little sudoku. He jumped into the gym, got a sweat in. Had a shower. Cleaned his closet.

“I say cleaned,” he says. “I moved some shit around.”

He sits back in his chair and says, with the smile again, “Yeah, just a good old day.”

If this were a story about my neighbor, or my brother-in-law Joe, as interesting a person as Joe is, you wouldn’t have read this far. Guy opens the door, guy settles the dogs, guy puts out some cheese and crackers. Guy cleaned his closet earlier. But it’s a story about Brad Pitt, who resides in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all movie stars, not only today but ever, as measured by any metric you like: raw talent, total earnings, handsomeness, box-office gross, natural magnetism, the overall quality and entertainment value of his canon so far. And also intrigue. His protracted divorce from Angelina Jolie, how his children don’t talk to him and reportedly dropped his last name, whatever heartbreaking thing is going on there—you’ve perhaps heard about this, and maybe that is part of the reason you keep reading.

Once the novelty of Brad Pitt preparing grocery-store hors d’oeuvres fades, what comes next is an adherence to the conventions of this meeting. He’s in a new movie, which of course is what he’s had me over here to talk about. The movie, though, turns out to be about something real to him. It turns out to be about resilience in the face of desperation and grabbing at shreds of hope, and when we get into that territory, this meeting, this afternoon, turns into something unexpected. Rare, even. I didn’t see it coming.

"Remember the Beavis and Butt-head episode—”

We’re talking about getting old, and we’ve just established our age difference: eleven years. (Pitt is sixty-two.) He laughs, and for a flicker of a second he sounds like Floyd, his stoner character from True Romance, which came out more than three decades ago.

“I can’t remember the scenario, but they were being chastised by an older person, and the comeback was just [Beavis voice] ‘You’re old.’ [Laughs.] That was the insult!”

His eyes are as blue and excitable and seductive as they were in that motel room in Thelma & Louise, before most people knew his name. But he is sixty-two, and there used to be a lot of guys who were older than guys like him. Men like Redford, Hackman, Newman, Duvall, Sutherland. “It’s a strange passing,” he says, stopping what he’s doing. “There was a comforting buffer over us, and now with them gone it’s like losing parents in that way. You’re the last stop.”

Robert Redford was fifty-five and already a legend when he directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It in 1992. (They also made Spy Game together in 2001, directed by Tony Scott—“There’s another fucker I really miss! He was such an original.”) Today Pitt doesn’t love his performance in River as Paul Maclean, the daredevil little brother, the kid who rode the rapids and dated Indians and gambled too much and died young. But he stole the movie, and three years later he received his first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.

“God, I want my fifties back,” he says, locking in on me a second. “I would do more. Your fifties are just—man, anything that’s on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.”

In his fifties Pitt starred in eleven movies, produced seventeen, and won an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. He’s attacking his sixties hard too. Just now he’s coming off two and a half years of continuous work, the longest stretch of his career. There was the release of the blockbuster F1, including an extended international press tour. Then he shot, in succession, Heart of the Beast, an intense man-and-his-dog story coming out this fall, in New Zealand; a new film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher, in which Pitt picks up his Oscar—winning role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth; and, finishing just a few weeks ago, The Riders, a dark thriller set to come out next year.

We pull down the little Perriers pretty quick, and I point out that he offered me wine earlier. At an awards ceremony in 2020, he thanked his friend Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober and talked more deeply about his sobriety on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, last June. I ask him if the wine is something for guests?

“No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.” Little laugh. He raises his famous opposing-diacritic eyebrows and holds a finger up: “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”

“You can have a glass of wine.”

“Yeah. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.” He likes mornings now anyway, and you can miss a lovely morning when you drink too much the night before, and it’s just not as interesting. Mornings are interesting, and he doesn’t want any more of them to go by unseen. Even on a day like today. His place affords travel-magazine views of the city, but today clouds blot out the blue from horizon to horizon, like pulled cotton. It’s typical for this time of year, but most hosts would have apologized for the sky not being blue on the day of my visit. Not Pitt. He surveys the sky, smiles, and says, “June gloom. I love June gloom. It’s just so much more contemplative and introspective.”

He stares out, grinning proudly, as if he’d built the city himself, arranged the view.

“Lovely.”

The World Cup is playing on mute on a flat-screen. Paraguay–Germany. Pitt occasionally peeks to his right to see what’s happening. Instead of the sound of the game, on the Bluetooth he’s got an album playing on repeat that he’s had on repeat for a week: So Help Me God, by Kelsey Lu, a singer and cellist. It’s dream music, carnal; Lu’s voice is a ribbon in the wind. A warm L. A. breeze fills the room, the doodles sleep, and the good old day feels, for a moment, without time. He’s brought over a bowl of plump green grapes, their skins wet, and he plucks a few from their stems and pops them into his mouth one at a time, like popcorn.

On the screen, a Paraguayan player trips, rolls on the pitch like a rag doll, and clutches his leg as if it had been chainsawed.

“I’m gonna start a class for flopping, because these guys are terrible,” he says. He stands and pretends to fall. His hands go limp on his wrists, his feet stumble, he grimaces in exaggerated, fake pain. “It’s some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen. I know drawing a foul is part of the gamesmanship, but man, they need a lot of help. And I’m going to start with [Brazilian star] Neymar, because as balletic as he is on the pitch, man, he needs some help. I’m going to show him how to sell it, do it with understatement, how not to do it too often so it reads as real. I got a whole curriculum.”

He walks over to the fridge to retrieve more hydration, this time two diminutive cans of grapefruit seltzer. He is not finished with the topic.

“It’s one of those things that’s accepted but that no one likes—like forties acting, when the female actors would swoon.” He holds the back of his hand to his forehead and says in a high-pitched lady voice, “ ‘Lawd!’ Bad acting drives me crazy. It’s why I can’t watch porn.”

Pitt is an acting fan the way a little boy is a baseball fan. He is a student of it, an acting enthusiast. When he talks about an actor or a performance he loved, he speaks in bursts of admiration, his easy, sandy voice filling with awe. Mention James Gandolfini, for example, and he is suddenly reverential, whispering, “God, he was good in Killing Them Softly,” a great, wiry little thriller from 2012. “That hotel scene. I felt like I was watching Brando at his best for two days straight. I was just a passenger, enjoying every minute of it.”

The other guy Pitt had the most scenes with in that movie was Richard Jenkins, the dry, soulful, and hilarious character actor.

“Jenkins!” He throws his hands up in the air, gets all smiley, 
and makes a noise like he just ate the best bite of pie he ever had. “Also one of my all-time favorites. I just had an instant friendship with him. Never disappoints. He’s so goddamn funny.”

He watches everything. He calls himself more of a viewer than a reader. (Except scripts. As both an actor and a producer, he reads a lot of scripts.) He falls asleep watching a show most nights. The Penguin, with Colin Farrell. That was another one. “How do you emote the way he did with an inch of rubber on your face? I’m telling you, it’s impossible to get any kind of emotion out, but he did it! And with a limp, and with having to sit through the chair for prosthetics—that drives me crazy. I had poison ivy a lot as a kid, on my face and neck from, you know, rolling around the woods,” he says, scrunching his face and rubbing his neck as if he had poison ivy right now. “That stuff drives me crazy. I cannot do it.”

He’s been offered roles in streaming shows, and he would take one if it felt right. “Winslet’s done a couple,” he says, of Kate Winslet, whom he doesn’t know but whose acting he loves. “She’s fired some beauties. Mare of Easttown. Staggering. But then this last one she did, The Regime, was just bonkers. She just commits, man. I love her commitment. I’ve tried to put in that level of commitment, certainly in Riders, this last thing I did, coming off watching Kate.”

Long before The Riders comes out, we’ll see Pitt in Heart of the Beast, written and directed by David Ayer. (Ayer also wrote and directed Fury, in which Pitt played a tank commander at the end of World War II who lived, and fought, by a code whose brutality, and purity, made him a hero.) In every role Pitt takes at age sixty-two, he wants to do something he’s never done before as an actor—even some small thing, even in just one scene, a single tendril of emotion he’s never spun in front of a camera in any of his movies before. That’s enough for him.

Beast is the story of an ex–Special Forces soldier flying a small plane in Alaska with his dog, who worked with him as a K-9 in the Army. The plane crashes, and man and dog are stuck, miles from nowhere, alone. A fellow traveler in the form of J.K. Simmons passes through the story like a ghost, or a fool. (“J.K. Simmons! Another great actor! Fuckin’ Whiplash! What an incendiary performance.”)

“Beast is a love story,” Pitt says. The movie moved me. I tell him this because it’s true. I tell him it pulled me toward a remote part of my own mind. Made me think about the things we do for each other. Pitt and the beautiful German shepherd who plays Odin are playing anyone who’s ever had to decide what to do when there is nothing left to do, which is to say they are playing all of us.

"What’s that ink?” He’s leaning forward, looking at the tattoo on my left forearm.

“That’s good,” he says, I guess of the craftsmanship? “I like that.”

“That?”

I rub a finger over it.

“That’s my brother. His initials, in nautical flags. He died a few years ago.”

He sits back in his chair.

“Oh, man.”

“Mike. Freak heart attack. Forty-six. He loved sailing. So.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“And really well done. How long ago, can I ask?”

“Yeah. It’s been about five years. A little more.”

Immediately, he says, “Ohhh. You’re just getting to the point where you can swallow it.”

Oh. Like he felt it. Like a man who has known loss.

Quite suddenly, that’s what Pitt is. A man who has known loss. Quite suddenly that’s all he is. A movie star the way I’m a writer and my brother-in-law Joe is a sound engineer and your plumber is a plumber.

He looks up, then back at me, and says, “I think grief is probably the most leveling of all emotions.”

He holds the edge of the table with his fingers and shakes his head back and forth a millimeter, a flinch, so fast you could miss it.

“That’s an understatement, even. Loss is certainly the most profound thing a human can endure. And the loneliness that can ensue is the greatest torture.” It’s the voice he used to say “attack your fifties” but less urgent, offered not as advice but shibboleth.

Pitt looks at the TV, though the game doesn’t seem to register with him at this moment, and out the windows at the gloom, and then back into my eyes. “Man, you’re on year five,” he says, shaking his head slowly now and still holding on to the edge of the table as if for ballast. “Year five, you just start breathing again.”

The conversation that follows wanders through cancer, divorce, the indignities of Alzheimer’s, dogs we have known and loved. He tells me about meeting groups of women in Africa who smiled joyful smiles and cooked delicious, nourishing food and carried on telling funny stories, and that he later learned that most of them had seen their fathers and brothers slaughtered in front of them. He tells me that since his mother died last year, his dad . . . “let’s just say it’s better to be the one who goes first.” They talk regularly, he and his dad, and Pitt is on his way to Missouri next week for a visit. They will sit on the front porch in the evenings, watching the lightning bugs and listening to the cicadas, and they will talk about the woman who is no longer there. “But we’re country people. We don’t go in depth, you know what I mean? Every now and then it’ll just be one line that cuts to the core, and then we kind of skip on.”

Pitt was telling a friend recently that he feels as if he’s too emotional sometimes, too tightly wound, which can make him wildly angry or wildly ecstatic, and he wishes he could be more even.

“And she said, ‘Yeah, you could do that. You could go to an ashram and be more even.’ But, she goes, ‘I don’t know, I believe in the human experience, and the human experience means I’m here to feel it all. Feel it all. The extreme highs and the depths of the soul-crushing lows.’ And that freed me. I heard that and I went, I’m going to stop feeling like there’s something wrong with that.”

One of the dogs, asleep at my feet, exhales a long, snorting, sweet sigh.

Those soul-crushing lows, though. I don’t know if souls can be crushed, but it can feel that way, and when it feels that way, we might never feel those extreme highs again. Or, rather, those extreme highs can feel as if they are only for other people to experience, people who haven’t known our lows or their depths.

I grab a piece of cheese and balance it on a cracker.

Brad Pitt looks at me. He pops a grape. Takes a breath.

The new palms sway just a bit in the wind.

“Yeah,” he says. “I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup. In fact, if I have any afflictions, it’s probably being a congenital optimist. Which has helped many times, and it’s also gotten me—I’ve walked foolishly head-on into a Mack truck because of my optimism. Or, as my forever-funny friend David Fincher will say, Yeah, you see the glass as half full, but it’s half full of urine. Anyway, I’ve never been suicidal except for one little period. And in that one little period, I just thought—I just couldn’t—just didn’t see a way out. The pain was so oppressive that—I wasn’t going to act on this, but I could feel—I could feel the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it felt like relief. And I thought, Oh, okay, now I understand—I understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just looking for relief from the pain. But I also think we have incredible survival instincts. And for me, that immediately kicked in, but it was just . . .”

He pauses, his head kind of rolling around on his neck, grappling, groping.

“Yeah. Like, listen: This shit ain’t easy.”

He stares at me.

“And you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”

Only Pitt, Jolie, and their children know exactly what’s going on between them all. Her allegations, his quiet, outside of whatever is said in rooms with lawyers and arbiters. But I ask him, less interested in the drama than in its consequences: When we talk about those moments, the ones when the pain was so oppressive that he could imagine feeling cold steel as relief, are we talking about them?

“Kid stuff?” I ask.

He leans forward on an elbow, takes half a breath, and looks across the table at me. “Family stuff,” he says.

He nods, looking at me. I nod.

“Family stuff,” I say. Something changes in the room, something molecular, for just a second. Crossed wires. A frame in black-and-white.

“Family stuff,” he says. “We could leave it at that.”

They’re into penalty kicks now. Each team gets five
kicks, and should they still be tied after five, it’s sudden death.

They’re tied after five.

“This is why sports is the great thing,” he says, in a crouch, holding his hair. “It’s a whole lifetime in one minute.”

On the credenza in front of the television sit nine small bowls, all different but of a set, each imperfect in a handcrafted way so that, all together, they are perfect. In a brief break in the game I ask him whether they are relics from his career of world travel.

“Nah, I was into matcha for a moment and I purchased elaborate matcha bowls,” he says, shaking his head and looking at the bowls as if for the first time in a while. “I’m all in. Whatever I’m doing, I’m all in.”

I don’t know why, but I ask him if he can tie a bow tie.

“Uh,” he says. “No. And you know how many years I’ve said, ‘I’m gonna learn’? And then I get to the event and I haven’t learned, so I just clip her on and go about my business.”

“You don’t even have someone tie it for you? You just clip her on?”

“Just clip the fucker on. I don’t think I’ve been to an award ceremony without a clip-on.”

“You accepted your Oscar wearing a clip-on bow tie.”

“One hundred percent.”

The players line up, one after another. The goalies squat. Pitt has no stake here, doesn’t care who wins, and hates that one team must.

“I hate—I hate—”

The world-travel part of Pitt’s life is for real. (And he’s a terrible packer, he says. He packs entire suitcases he never opens. He tells me that his girlfriend of several years, Ines de Ramon, is not only good at packing but puts the clothes neatly in the hotel dresser drawer. Pitt says he’s “learning.”) Beast, for example, was filmed in New Zealand because the tax breaks there make it less expensive. Just then his mind jumps to the metastasizing practice of using AI to create visual effects for movies that otherwise might be too expensive to make at all. “There’s a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, forty- to ninety-million-dollar budgeted films, get made,” he says.

And then my mind jumps to the lurking practice of using AI to replace actors. Could a director have made Heart of the Beast starring an AI version of Pitt, the way someone last December created an AI video of him fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop? He pauses, looks at the ceiling.

“Well, they would have got it—no, because—well, it depends on who’s creating it, you know? Who’s behind it, who’s telling the story,” he says, working through his answer in real time. “Who’s saying, ‘I want to see this emotion from him,’ and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, ‘More in this direction,’ and tailoring it in that way. So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing.

“Look, it’s gonna be a very interesting experiment. They’re telling us all to—”

He looks out the window.

“I get great hawks out here. So beautiful. To scan ourselves. I’ve been scanned for the last twenty years, and I’ve always put in my contract: I own them and I destroy them. I should have kept them! All this time I’ve always had them destroyed, because I’m paranoid Ozark boy.”

It’s an interesting thought, this idea of a Brad Pitt that is merely the collection of every emotion he’s expressed and move he’s made in previous movies. It’s especially interesting considering that the real Brad Pitt is looking for things to do that he’s never done before, that aren’t yet part of the Pitt algorithm, as if he’s trying to outpace himself.

“I heard an AI song the other day that was pretty damn good,” he says. “But it had a repetitive nature to it. It’s not going to be the same as hearing her voice—a woman’s voice, a person’s voice.”

He rubs the back of his head.

“I saw a show the other week in Paris. I saw Flea and Thom Yorke get up onstage and they did Marvin Gaye. With Flea’s jazz band,” he says, looking up at me. “Ohhh, it was off the charts, full of joy.”

He points a finger, says, “AI can’t do that.”

Pitt is playing Cliff Booth again, the Hollywood stuntman character that won him his acting Oscar, in a movie that comes out November 25. (Could the director, David Fincher, have used AI to concoct a Pitt performance for this movie culled from his performance in Once Upon a Time . . ., in which he played the same character?) At one point, the Booth movie was dead. Tarantino had declared that he would direct ten movies in his lifetime and then retire, and it was set to be his tenth. Then he decided that for his final film he wanted to do something new, not a movie that could be construed as a sequel.

So that was the end of the Booth movie.

But then Pitt got to thinking. What about Fincher? Fincher had directed him in Seven, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and their friendship is strong. Pitt wrote to Tarantino, asking if he could at least show Fincher the script.

“Quentin gave me his blessing,” Pitt says. He’s getting excited telling the story. “Finch and I were on a plane and I gave him the script, and by the time we landed he said, ‘I’m doing it.’ ”

The movie isn’t a sequel, really. It’s “the continuing adventures of . . .” I saw the first twenty-four minutes of the film in a small screening room at Fincher’s L. A. office, and it’s a movie lover’s dream. Fincher’s kill-shot direction of Tarantino’s ace script and Pitt carrying the whole thing with a smirk? Make another one.

Rather than a sequel, Pitt compares it to the kind of episodic television Tarantino has said he grew up watching, with characters you could follow from adventure to adventure, but each episode also stood on its own. The Rockford Files. Joe Mannix in Mannix.

“Alias Smith and Jones and all that stuff,” Pitt says, listing them off. That one was a short-lived western episodic that ran for a couple years in the early 1970s. “It was based on Butch and Sundance. And I’ll tell you a funny story.”

He rubs his chin, smiling. “I loved Butch and Sundance. I’d seen that in kindergarten, so I’m probably in first grade, and I love this show Alias Smith and Jones. Maybe I’m in second grade. They start the second season, and I saw on the news that one of the lead actors had killed himself. I was at my grandma’s little three-room house with my folks, and I had to go into the bedroom and silently cry, because I didn’t want them to see me cry. Because I was embarrassed. Because that wasn’t the era for that. Do you know what I mean? Boys and tears.”

I know what he means. I nod a little, my own hand on my chin.

Pitt has been rethinking that Stephen Stills song lately, “Love the One You’re With.” He always hated it, because to him it was about settling for something less than, or at least different from, what you really wanted. His current interpretation is that it’s about appreciating what you do have rather than lamenting what you don’t. The friends who hung in with you, the family who understand you, the people who are still here. He calls it focusing on the positive.

Pitt will sometimes be in his car, rolling along, and see people sitting at a café, eating and laughing, and he will think how happy and carefree they look. He will feel something like envy. Maybe he will think of his children. He will certainly think of his dad, creaking around in the darkened rooms of the old house, all by himself, and he will feel something like anger.

At God? At the world? At those carefree people?

“It’s a hard one to square,” he says. “But I’m going to go back to: I think the challenge is to hold both. Grief, if you survive it, leaves a gaping hole, but it also leaves profound beauty. It’s an aching beauty, but it’s beauty.”

The question is, or one question is, when you feel like that actor in Alias Smith and Jones did, or like Pitt did during the family stuff—and we’ve all felt that way, whether we admit it to ourselves or not—what can a person do? How do you climb out of it?

“Wow,” he says and stays silent for a moment. Then: “I don’t see it as climbing out of it. It’s going through it and trying and trying and trying and trying to the point of exhaustion and then trying again. I don’t want to ignore the place where you run up against the wall. But I just one day woke up, and it just felt a little sunnier and the air felt a little sweeter. Just microdoses of it.”

As Kelsey Lu sings, a Paraguayan player knocks Germany out of the tournament with one kick. An upset. Our conversation goes to things like schedules, movie screenings, and the winding down of the afternoon. He’s rummaging around for a sticky note and a pen to give me his email address, muttering, “Where the . . . ?”

And then, as if a switch were flipped, he snaps back to the idea. He needs to finish the thought. He stops looking for a pen.

He says, “Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way. Maybe we’ve got to start with letting go of all control, that need, that belief about the way things should be or what should have been or how things are supposed to be and then trying to control it, trying to hammer and tong it into some kind of shape, which is impossible. Maybe that’s really the road to waking up and the sun’s a little brighter one day and the air’s a little sweeter. And that in itself is acceptance, I would say.”

I’m looking at the little matcha bowls, nodding a little. The Paraguay players are rolling on the grass, hugging each other now, shouting, joyful. I think I see a German cry.

Pitt says he’s going to order Korean barbecue for dinner tonight. From Genwa, the place on Wilshire. It’s the best. He uses Postmates. And then maybe he’ll watch something.


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“If people knew the whole truth, they would have more sympathy for the children and respect them,” a source close to Jolie says. “The fact they aren’t speaking ill or sharing things publicly only shows their decency.”

The source adds, “Angie hasn’t been fighting and isn’t angry. She just wants everyone to heal.”




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Thursday, July 16, 2026

Angelina Jolie is embarking on a new chapter.

The mom of six recently celebrated the milestone of seeing her two youngest, twins Vivienne and Knox, turn 18 on July 12. Jolie, 51, is now “ready” to “experience the world” with them and move on from their life in California, a source tells PEOPLE.

“She’s been talking about leaving Los Angeles for years,” says the insider. “She’s happy to have more freedom and flexibility in her life.”

The Couture actress-producer shares her six children — Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and the twins — with ex Brad Pitt. The Mr. and Mrs. Smith costars separated in 2016 after 12 years together and two years of marriage, finalizing their divorce in December 2024.

“The kids have always been her priority,” continues the source.

Jolie “has wanted them to experience the world and she’s excited that they can all do more of that together now,” the source adds. “She’s ready for it.”

Jolie hinted to The Hollywood Reporter in August 2024 that while she “grew up in” Los Angeles, as the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, she was living in the city “because I have to be here from a divorce.” Referencing Vivienne and Knox, Jolie said, “But as soon as they’re 18, I’ll be able to leave.”

“When you have a big family, you want them to have privacy, peace, safety,” the Oscar winner said at the time. “I have a house now to raise my children, but sometimes this place can be … that humanity that I found across the world is not what I grew up with here. [After Los Angeles,] I’ll spend a lot of time in Cambodia. I’ll spend time visiting my family members wherever they may be in the world.”

This May, Jolie officially listed her California compound, formerly owned by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, for $29.85 million.

Jolie and Pitt, 62, have been embroiled in an ongoing legal battle over Château Miraval since 2022. In 2024, a source told PEOPLE that the F1 star, who has been dating jewelry designer Ines de Ramon since November 2022, has “virtually no contact” with his adult children. At the time, he still had visitation with his younger kids, but they have all since become legal adults.

In June, while speaking about her role in the Alice Winocour-directed French film Couture, Jolie offered rare insight into her love life, telling Yahoo Entertainment, “I haven’t dated or been with anyone since I divorced a decade ago.”

Jolie’s next projects include the crime thriller Sunny and the crime comedy Anxious People.
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Monday, June 29, 2026



“I haven't dated or been with anyone since I divorced a decade ago, right?” she told Yahoo Entertainment of her 2016 split from ex-husband, Brad Pitt. “So I kind of get in my head that that aspect of me is not centered in my life if I'm focusing on my children and my family.”

“So it took me a second to say, ‘Look, she can also love her daughter and be dedicated to her daughter and also need this as a woman and receive this as a woman.' And that in fact, it might be very healing for her,” Jolie reflected.

The Oscar winner admitted, “Life has broken me a little,” adding, “I have to live again. Be free again.”

She also noted that her three daughters, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and Vivienne, 17, have encouraged her to move forward with her life.

“They speak to me as young women, and I see what I want for them,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “I see what I don't want them to lose and what I want them to hold on to. And in a way, this is reminding me of what I might have lost myself.”

The mother of six said her daughters are “bringing me back to my old self.”

“I think they kind of want me now to not just be ‘Mom,' ” she told the outlet. “There's a different room for me to be that woman again, that's not just a mom.”

Jolie said of her future plans, “I'm thinking I have to live again. Be free again.”


Yahoo

Like Maxine, Jolie is taking stock in midlife. When I ask whether the questions she's asking herself now are different from the ones she wrestled with decades ago, she doesn't hesitate.

"Oh, completely," she says, but then pauses: "Completely and maybe I've come around to being a little bit more the person I used to be."

Jolie continues, "I'm discovering something now that my daughters are older. They're talking to me as young women, and I'm seeing what I want for them. I'm seeing what I don't want them to lose and what I want them to hold on to. And it's kind of reminding me what I may have lost."

Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died from complications of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007. The actor could sense how personal the story was for Winocour, who drew from her own experiences.

"Nobody could write it had they not experienced it," Jolie says. "Very subtle things, but very real."

The feeling was mutual; Winocour says Jolie was the obvious choice for the role.

"Because it was so personal, I needed someone to play the part who had a special connection with the subject," the director says. "I think she shares with Maxine Walker this idea that she's a fighter. She's moving on."

Among the details that resonated most with Jolie were the small, often unspoken realities that follow devastating news.

"The way you almost debate the doctor, the way you keep thinking, I need to do this, these other things," she says. "You haven't quite switched your realities. You haven't quite accepted the gravity of what it is. You are both afraid and overwhelmed and don't know how to tell people you love."

Yet what moved Jolie most wasn't the diagnosis itself. It was the love story and Maxine's relationship with her cinematographer, played by French actor Louis Garrel.

"So often we see, when there's a project that's dealing with a woman's cancer, it's not often where her sexuality post-diagnosis is celebrated," she says.

When Jolie first read the script, she was struck by how intentionally Winocour approached that part of Maxine's story. The Oscar winner says the film challenges the idea that illness should become someone's sole identity.

"This was a part of continuing to live all aspects, to live to your last breath, right?" she explains. "And not to start living only as a patient."

That theme became especially meaningful in one of the film's most intimate scenes. Jolie acknowledges that exploring that side of her character forced her to confront some of her own assumptions.

"To be candid, I haven't dated since I divorced a decade ago," she says. "So I kind of get in my head that that aspect of me is not centered in my life if I'm focusing on my children, my family."

Playing Maxine, who has one daughter, reminded Jolie that the two aren't mutually exclusive.

"It took me a second to kind of say, well, she can also love her daughter and be dedicated to her daughter and also need this as a woman and receive this as a woman."

In the end, Jolie believes Couture's greatest love story isn't the romance at all, but the bond between a mother and daughter. It's also a reminder that life's most difficult moments can clarify what matters most.

For Jolie, that idea of reexamining priorities — and choosing what matters most — resonates far beyond the screen.

"So yes, things are changing, but in a way I didn't expect. It doesn't feel like I'm 51 and starting to think of being older. I'm thinking I have to live again. Be free again," she says. "In a way that maybe life has broken me a little bit."
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Friday, June 26, 2026



New June filings say depositions of Oliynik and the “persons most qualified” from Tenute del Mondo B.V. and Nouvel LLC — the entity Jolie sold to Tenute del Mondo — must take place in London by Sept. 30.

On June 24, the California Court of Appeal reversed part of a prior decision on Shefler's role in the Miraval sale, finding it “defies credulity” that Shefler would risk nearly $40 million on a transaction in which he had no involvement. A hearing on a motion to compel Shefler's deposition is scheduled for July 8.

A lawyer for Jolie told PEOPLE on June 25 that the rulings “have made no impact on the merits of the case, and certainly has no impact on Ms. Jolie's case,” adding, “At this point, Ms. Jolie is just looking forward to defeating the case at trial next year so that their family can finally focus their energies on healing and moving on.”
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Tuesday, June 23, 2026






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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 16: Angelina Jolie arrives at a screening of "Couture" at The Whitby Hotel on June 16, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026

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In “Couture,” Angelina Jolie plays Maxine, a low-budget horror movie director juggling a film commission from a French luxury fashion house and being a single mother in the midst of a divorce when she receives a devastating breast cancer diagnosis.

“Couture” writer and director Alice Winocour says she wrote the French and English language drama with the Oscar-winner in mind.

“I needed someone special, someone that would have a special connection with the story,” Winocour says. “Angelina has a lot in common with the character. She’s also a director and she has been through this — not cancer — but everyone knows her story. So I felt like it’s for her.”

“Also what I liked with Angelina was that she had this kind of punk spirit and punk energy and raw energy, and it’s really what I wanted for the film,” Winocour says.

I’m on a Zoom with Winocour and Jolie.

I ask Jolie if she considers herself punk. “I think I’m more punk now,” she says. “Yes, it has an energy, but it’s also kind of the counter movement to a lot of what’s happening. So even sometimes my privacy or not completely being sucked into a lot of things or movements — sometimes the doing less, or being private, when the world is the way it is right now, that is an opposite.”

“I think my fighting spirit is finally back,” she says. “I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it’s coming back in large part thanks to my children, who are now older, and encouraging it.”

“My kids are almost all 18, so now they want to see me traveling the world, they want me to get out and do things. They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot. I think they’re very encouraging of me kind of getting back to aspects of myself that maybe I hadn’t felt as free to do.”

“I had kind of quit acting before my divorce,” she says. “I was focusing on directing, and I thought I’d be doing my international work. But then suddenly the only way to be home more and for short periods of time being away or to make a good amount of money, was to go back to acting. I was only taking things that were short or close by or I could take [my children].”

“Couture” is very much an ensemble co-starring Ella Rumpf as a makeup artist and aspiring writer, and South Sudanese model Anyier Anei as a new model who travels to Paris for the first time and is the star of Maxine’s fashion film. All three women find themselves meeting each other at pivotal and very vulnerable times in their lives. “We are stronger together,” Winocour says. “The film is about also the solidarity and that woman who bare scars, sometimes you tell you the most personal thing you have to a stranger … What we wanted to show was this fragile moment between human beings.”

The original title of the film was “Ride or Die,” Winocour says. “It’s about the spirit of survival,” she says. “The world is so difficult. It’s like, let’s celebrate life together. We see all the wounds behind the perfect images, but it’s all those people who are connecting to each other and sharing things together.”

In one scene, a doctor outlines Maxine’s incision lines with red ink on her bare chest ahead of undergoing a double mastectomy. Jolie said Vincent Lindon, who plays the physician, was so convincing she felt as if he was with a real doctor: “As a patient, as a woman, I wanted to lean on him and ask him, ‘Am I going to be OK?’”

The scene brought back memories of her own health journey. “It’s very sobering in realizing – like the [doctor] says in the film — we’re all going to die, we’re all not here forever,” Jolie says. “I think having lost my mom young and never met my grandmother, I have never lived feeling like I’m going to have a long life. I’m already past the age when my mother was diagnosed. I may struggle from almost feeling like I can’t live in the moment because I feel like I have to push and rush because time’s running out.”

She continues, “I raise my kids almost preparing them for my absence and not as much preparing to be a grandmother,” she continues. “That’s what happens when you consider death as a reality.”

“Couture” is in theaters June 26.




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Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Angelina Jolie's new movie Couture is a deeply personal one for the Oscar winner.

In the film written and directed by Alice Winocour, Jolie, 51, plays Maxine, an American film director who's in Europe filming a segment for a fashion show when she's diagnosed with breast cancer.

Jolie's own mother Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian and breast cancer in 2007. Jolie herself revealed in 2013 she had a double mastectomy after testing positive for the “faulty” BRCA1 gene, increasing her chances of developing breast cancer by 87 percent.

Couture — which also features intersecting storylines involving young model and immigrant Ada (Anyier Anei) and makeup artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf) — "is a beautifully written piece about women from different countries," Jolie tells PEOPLE.

Jolie, who plays a woman diagnosed with cancer in the film, hosted a dinner and discussion at Atelier Jolie in N.Y.C. on June 15

"It has something to say that I thought could be useful to people, showing how everyone is dealing with things that make us very human, and that if we can figure out how to live through challenges by leaning on each other and having more empathy towards one another, the better and less alone we will be," she adds.

In that spirit of community, Jolie hosted an intimate dinner — catered by the immigrant and refugee chefs of Eat Offbeat — on Monday, June 15, in N.Y.C., where guests honored the strength of cancer survivors. The 20 invitees who gathered at Atelier Jolie, the actress's downtown creative collective, included Columbia University's Dr. Rita Charon, a general internist and literary scholar, as well as Winocour.

"Alice is a wonderful director and approaches the stories of the women in Couture with sensitivity and hope. The film is not about an end for my character but rather about a renewed desire to live life until your last breath which particularly resonates with me at this time in my life," Jolie adds.

"I am not sure I was strong enough even five years ago to do this. To be open and trusting to share and be vulnerable again," says the mother of six.

"Things happen in life that take us off path. We lose ourselves and we feel isolated. I would have given anything to have my mother alive to be there for her grandchildren," she says.

Jolie debuted Couture at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and spoke about her connection to the film. While making the movie, “I felt very vulnerable,” she told Variety at the time.

“I feel like it's such a personal film,” continued Jolie, who wore one of her late mom's necklaces while making the movie. “It felt so private that in my mind, it's probably the one film that doesn't feel like a film.”
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Monday, June 15, 2026

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Saturday, June 13, 2026



Knox was the last of the kids to manifest his preference. As the 3rd source below indicated, this was not about the incident on the plane but about Brad's actions in its aftermath. The kids could understand and forgive his drunken rampage. It was human frailty, a loss of control driven by his alcohol abuse. They know of his immediate efforts to change: quit drinking, join AA and undergo therapy. What they could not understand was his refusal to publicly accept responsibilty and the lies he resorted to to do so. His conscious, deliberate actions are what matter.

Brad has only made very vague references to his actions on the plane and after. The closest he came to a confession was in the voice-overs by his character in Ad Astra and in his promotional interviews for the film. All of which were easily undermined by his reps' dissembling to sow confusion and shift the blame to Angelina. Those actions continue up to now.

As the source stated, it is Brad's lack of honesty that eroded the kids' trust. He has not displayed the integrity, courage and selflessness the kids could look up to and be proud of.  As he said to GQ:
"In the end, you find: I am those things I don't like. That is a part of me. I can't deny that. I have to accept that. And in fact, I have to embrace that. I need to face that and take care of that. Because by denying it, I deny myself. I am those mistakes."
It's been 10 years, and he still hasn't taken care of it.

If all the waiting in the family has been because he assured them he will make things right, that may be like Waiting for Godot. He may not publicly confess and apologize for so long as he has movies to promote -- and he has movies stretching to the horizon.

When the choice comes down to his career or his family, he has consistently chosen his movie career. If, in the end, it is only his movies that carry his name but not any of his kids, that was the deliberate choice he made. As the saying goes: You made your bed and now lie in it.





Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s son Knox dropped “Pitt” from his last name on his high school diploma.

The teenager, who turns 18 on July 12, used the name “Knox Jolie” on his certificate after graduating from Fusion Academy in Los Angeles earlier this month, a source exclusively told Page Six.

A second source exclusively told Page Six that Angelina “seems quite pleased with herself about the total success of her long-standing, intense, deliberate effort to alienate her children from their father.”

“It’s so sad for the entire family that she would use the same weapon of the name change over and over for any other purpose other than to hurt their father,” the insider continued. “This was her goal and she succeeded.”

A third source exclusively told Page Six, “Angelina participated in years of family therapy with Brad and the children for everyone to try to heal after the events that led her to file for divorce.”

“If he isn’t close to the kids, it’s because of the harm that was done,” the insider added. “He wasn’t honest about his actions, and it affected the trust between them. It’s been very hard for the kids. No one knows, except them, how bad it has been.”

The source continued: “The children are now adults and make their own decisions, which deserve respect. If they choose to distance themselves from him, it comes from that pain and harm. It’s really horrible that he has tried to paint himself as a victim. When will people start asking real questions about what happened to the kids?”






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Tuesday, June 9, 2026


Unlike Shiloh, Maddox and Zahara waited years after they turned 18.

Zahara signed the petition April 28 but it was only filed in court June 4. She had made up her mind but still waited a month.

Pax is still waiting.

What is all the waiting about?







In documents obtained by PEOPLE on Tuesday, June 9, the 21-year-old filed a petition for a change of name in the Superior Court of California. TMZ was first to report the news.

PEOPLE reached out to reps for Jolie and Pitt.

Zahara’s filing dates back to April 28 and came just days after her brother, 24-year-old Maddox Jolie, also filed to legally remove his father’s last name following their parents’ split in 2016 after two years of marriage and over 10 years as a couple. Their divorce was finalized in December 2024.




On Tuesday (June 9), TMZ reported that Zahara, 21, filled court documents to remove “Pitt” as her last name.

According to the petition filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Zahara is asking for her new legal name to be “Zahara Marley Jolie.”


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Sunday, June 7, 2026



Support+Feed Pickleball Invitational and Game Night, Los Angeles

Maggie Baird, Patrick O'Connell and Angelina Jolie at Support+Feed Pickleball Invitational and Game Night, Los Angeles held at PIKL LA on June 06, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images)

Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt and Angelina Jolie at Support+Feed Pickleball Invitational and Game Night, Los Angeles held at PIKL LA on June 06, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images)









Knox graduation



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