Showing posts with label Brad Pitt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brad Pitt. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 10, 2024






Do you know how sexy Brad Pitt is? He’s so sexy that People named him Sexiest Man Alive twice. Only he, George Clooney, Richard Gere, and Johnny Depp have been bestowed the honor more than once, and Pitt’s were just a few years apart, first in 1995 and then again in 2000. Such was the power of Pitt at his apex: so hot that a magazine had to scream it twice, nationally, on the glossy cover, in just a little more time than it takes to pick an American president.

It was a combination of 1994’s Legends of the Fall and Interview with the Vampire, and his new relationship with future Goop tastemaker Gwyneth Paltrow, that made Pitt—with his shoulder-length blond hair and precise stubble—so attractive. In his 1995 People cover story, he’s described as “good-looking, intelligent, and sensitive,” the trifecta for a man appealing to a modern woman of the ’90s. He wasn’t just a hot guy—he was the perfect guy. To dream of the perfect man is to dream of the impossible, and an actor like Pitt suggests he could be just that: good-looking, intelligent, and sensitive, indeed.

For most of his career, Brad Pitt has been the name you come up with when someone asks you to imagine the male movie star. Not an action guy like Tom Cruise, not a moody art-flick weirdo like Joaquin Phoenix. Pitt’s movies were critical and commercial successes, from Seven to the Ocean’s trilogy to Fight Club, a film from which a generation of young men took the wrong message (and we’ve all been paying for it ever since). His reputation was pristine, both personally and professionally. He was charming, likable, and bankable; in later years, his roles as husband to Angelina Jolie and father to their six children seemed to only bolster his profile.

It was only when Pitt and Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, and in the eight-plus-year legal proceedings that followed, that cracks in his image began to show as alleged details of their marriage filtered down to the public. A court filing by Jolie, submitted as a cross-complaint against Pitt in 2022, made public the ugly details of their split. The filing says that during a private flight from France to California in September 2016, days before Jolie filed for divorce, Pitt accused her of being “too deferential” to their kids. According to her account, he yelled at her in the bathroom, grabbed her by the head and shook her, pushed her into the wall, punched the plane’s ceiling and poured alcohol on Jolie and the kids. When their children tried to defend their mother, the filing continues, Pitt “choked” one and “struck” another in the face.

Pitt has disputed that account of events, and the FBI, along with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, closed the investigation of the incident without filing charges. Jolie has said very little publicly about the specifics of what happened on that plane, but has brought a lawsuit against the FBI. Her complaint includes the claim that the agent investigating the 2016 incident laid out a statement of probable cause for charging Pitt. Meanwhile, the press has reported that most of Pitt’s children—who have been the subject of a prolonged custody battle between their parents—no longer speak to him. A few have dropped his last name in public. (A representative for Pitt declined to comment for this story.)

Despite all that has come out about Pitt’s alleged behavior toward his second wife and kids—and what came even before that, if you care to look more closely—his reputation has remained largely intact. The allegations made against him have been brushed over or studiously ignored by Hollywood tastemakers, the press, and vast swaths of the public. He continues to get the glossy-magazine-cover treatment at GQ. He’s still the babyface hawking coffee beans and Chanel’s fall/winter ready-to-wear line. He’s remained dutifully employed, with his latest movie, Wolfs—a collaboration between Pitt, old friend George Clooney, and Apple, which is reportedly paying them $35 million each to star in the film—out in theaters on Sept. 20.

That’s the thing about Brad Pitt: He’s Brad Pitt. Unlike many of his contemporaries who have struggled to regain a foothold in Hollywood after getting into trouble, Pitt has managed to thoroughly launder his reputation with limited blowback. In this retelling, he is a man wounded by the women to whom he gave his heart; a humanitarian and a feminist ally who has used his production work to bring to life women-focused films; a recovering addict on a journey of self-healing and growth. To challenge Pitt’s narrative is to confront our own complicity as an audience, one that’s always been eager to hear—and believe—his version of the story.

Brad Pitt, born in Oklahoma and raised in Missouri, moved to Los Angeles in the late ’80s to kickstart his acting career in CBS procedurals and forgettable comedies. In 1991, he got the first of a few big breaks—including as a Levi’s model in an ad where he is freed from a Mexican jail possessing nothing but a film camera, only to be picked up by a hot brunette who gives him a new pair of jeans that fit him like a glove. That year, Pitt was also featured as J.D., Geena Davis’ love interest in Thelma & Louise, an armed robber on the run who eventually steals all of her money and bails on her. “J.D. appears as the perfect antidote to all the toxic masculinities that Thelma and Louise encounter on their journey,” Manuela Lazic wrote in the Ringer in 2020. “J.D. listens and talks only when his opinion is requested,” the piece goes on. “J.D. enjoys all the preliminaries and doesn’t need to force himself on her to get her into bed.”

Thelma & Louise—and even the Levi’s ad—marked the beginning of what would be Brad Pitt’s zenith: his ability to playact as the man of your dreams, even when he was kind of the bad guy. Charming, with just a soupçon of rot and abs like a pack of King’s Hawaiian rolls, he was a guy you could safely fantasize about. His personal life suggested he was worthy of adoration, too: In 1994, he started dating rising star and Hollywood royalty Gwyneth Paltrow, speaking adoringly about her in the press. “Why do people get married? For the bad times,” he told Rolling Stone after they got engaged in 1996. “Marriage is an amazing thing,” he added. “I’m only going to do it once.”

Pitt, in fact, did not only do it once. He and Paltrow never married, and were broken up a year later, ushering in Pitt’s next relationship with another likable daughter of Hollywood cosplaying as girl-next-door. When he was set up on a date with Jennifer Aniston by their agents in 1998, it was kismet. America’s Sweetheart and America’s Sharpest Male Jaw, together at last. They were a bona fide supercouple, the ideal relationship of any star-worshipper’s dream. It’s hard to explain how big the Pitt/Aniston wedding was to someone steeped in today’s celebrity bridal culture. These days, 200 guests in Malibu with 50,000 flowers and a Melissa Etheridge performance seems almost quaint; 24 years ago, a $1 million wedding was considered ludicrous and yet utterly watchable, so much so that airspace above the wedding was restricted to keep paparazzi in helicopters away.

Five years after they tied the knot, they announced their split in People magazine. The divorce became legend, and front-page news, like when the homecoming king and queen break up the summer after graduation. Despite the niceties of their coordinated PR statement, lurking under the surface were rumors about the “real” reason for their divorce: Pitt wanted kids, while Aniston didn’t. She was a ruthless careerist preventing her husband from fulfilling his destiny of having children—it was fourth-wave feminism that broke them up! “You could tell the emotion and see it in [Pitt’s] heart, this is what he wanted more than anything,” People magazine executive editor Peter Castro told ABC News. “But she wasn’t there with him.”

From there, tabloids spent the next decade and a half painting Aniston as either a cold workaholic who ran her marriage into the ground or a pitiful, aging crone who was desperate for a baby. OK!, Star, In Touch, and Us Weekly wrote headline after headline about Aniston’s nonexistent pregnancies; variations of “I’ll Raise This Baby Alone!” or “Pregnant & Alone” were splashed on covers lining every grocery checkout counter for most of the mid-2000s. In reality, Aniston was struggling with IVF. The “narrative was that I was selfish. I just cared about my career,” she told Allure in 2022. “It was absolute lies.” A friend close to Aniston told Vanity Fair at the time that, actually, it was Pitt who didn’t want children. “Did he think, I need to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose,” the friend said, “so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultra-feminist and I’m going to get cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?”

Two months after Pitt and Aniston announced their split, the Mr. & Mrs. Smith star was seen vacationing with his co-star Jolie and her then 3-year-old son, Maddox, in Kenya. After they officially stepped out together as a couple in 2006, there was breathless tabloid coverage about Pitt adopting Jolie’s children, and then of their eventually having three more together, all sharing the Jolie-Pitt surname. While Aniston was getting alternately attacked and patronized in the press, Pitt let the public mutate the fight into one not between him and his ex-wife, but instead between his ex-wife and his new girlfriend. While blogs, tabloids, and regular folks were deciding if they were Team Jolie or Team Aniston, Pitt seemed to be a virtual nonentity in this love triangle that triangulated largely around him.

Granted, it was never entirely a fair fight. Why would anyone take Aniston’s side when Jolie was right there? Jolie was a steward of the world, having become a very public activist at that point, flying around as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, adopting children around the world. Jolie—all tits and hips and lips—gave Pitt those kids he had been yearning for. On her worst day, Jolie was seen as a homewrecking slut; on Aniston’s worst day, she was a barren hag.

But Jolie scored the greatest point in her inadvertent battle against Aniston: She got the guy. Brad Pitt, golden boy and dutiful second husband, remained the ultimate prize.

If Pitt’s star power amplified Jolie’s celebrity and reaffirmed her likability, then her reformed image as a tattooed, brother-kissing weirdo-turned-mommy helped Pitt eradicate his own culpability from the record. It was never his fault that his first marriage ended, or that he had (allegedly) been enticed by another woman while simply doing his job. The rumors of the onset of their relationship didn’t make a better story than the inevitable conclusion of them ending up together, a coupling so powerful that we called them by one name: Brangelina.

Pitt’s irreproachability was further burnished by Jolie’s humanitarian shine, which rubbed off on him. He leaned into a new version of himself, one that was more charitable and more foundationally patriarchal, right down to the infamous W Magazine photoshoot in which Pitt, opposite Jolie, cosplayed some version of Father Knows Best. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Pitt started the Make It Right foundation to help rebuild houses in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. People ran photos of Jolie and Maddox at press conferences for Make It Right’s many projects. (Make It Right would eventually promise to give these homeowners millions of dollars because the homes themselves were unlivable.) Through Jolie, Pitt was inhabiting a new role that would further protect him from scrutiny over his personal choices: fatherhood. And while he and Jolie were building their lives together, the tabloids were in lockstep, always describing Pitt as a devoted husband and deeply involved parent. Even now, at 60, the tabloids are still writing headlines about how he wants more kids.

After only two years of marriage, the star couple announced their 2016 separation to People, with Jolie filing for divorce soon thereafter. Media coverage of the end of Brangelina was breathless, but less sure where to place the blame. People reported that Pitt was “wrecked” over Jolie’s decision to leave, and that he “begged” her to stay with him. USA Today reported that Jolie, diverging from her husband, was more focused on her work with the U.N. and less interested in acting. It was only TMZ that initially reported that Jolie was tired of Pitt’s alleged weed and alcohol abuse, and that she was worried about his “anger problem.” The tabloid also noted how “significant” it was that Jolie was asking that Pitt not have joint physical custody of their kids, and instead that he be granted visitation. But, by and large, Pitt was being portrayed as an abandoned husband who wanted to save the marriage. It didn’t help that Jolie had hired Laura Wasser, perhaps the country’s most famous divorce attorney. Jolie went from being the other woman, to the wife, to the bitter ex trying to ruin a good man’s name.

Pitt, though—he was a good guy, right? In 2017, in the same story in which Jolie told the New York Times that she—among countless other women in and out of the movie business—had been sexually harassed by movie producer Harvey Weinstein in the late 1990s, Paltrow shared an account of how, in 1995, her then-boyfriend Pitt had confronted Weinstein after the film producer had harassed her. “I think the interesting thing is that we, Hollywood specifically, but the workplace, men and women’s dynamics is being recalibrated, recalibrated in a very good way that is long overdue. And I do think that’s an important story to tell,” Pitt told CNN in 2019, sharing his side of the story. He has been applauded for standing up to Weinstein, but even after that alleged confrontation, Pitt went on to work with the producer twice more: first in 2009 with Inglourious Basterds, which Weinstein produced and distributed, and then in 2012 with Killing Them Softly, which was distributed by the Weinstein Company. (The Daily Beast reported that a source close to Pitt said Weinstein’s involvement, and their interactions, were “limited.”) What did Jolie, his partner at the time, think of Pitt’s involvement with Weinstein? “I never associated or worked with him again,” she said in 2021. “It was hard for me when Brad did. We fought about it. Of course it hurt.”

That same year, Jolie sold her stake in Château Miraval, the French vineyard she and Pitt co-owned, and the place where they had wed in 2014. Pitt sued her for it in 2022, saying she was intentionally trying to “inflict harm” on him by selling her half “in secret.” Steadily, a more fulsome story of their divorce began unfurling. Acting as a Jane Doe, Jolie filed a Freedom of Information Act suit requesting that FBI documentation about the 2016 plane incident be released. The redacted documents included allegations that, while on a private jet, Pitt grabbed Jolie, shook her, pushed her into a wall, punched the ceiling, and poured a beer on her before pouring wine on his kids, hitting one in the face and choking another.

In response to the details of this incident going public, Jolie was treated similarly to Amber Heard, who has repeatedly accused her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, of physically and verbally abusing her. (Depp won a defamation case against Heard in the United States over her allegations, but lost a similar case against the Sun newspaper in the U.K.) An NBC News investigation found that online content creators were suggesting Jolie was using “Amber Heard” tactics, that their divorce would be “the next Depp v. Heard.” The questions weren’t around what happened on the plane or how Pitt might respond; it was all about whether Jolie was lying in order to tear down a powerful man she was once married to. Even the response to her maintaining custody and contact with her kids has led a vocal faction of people online to suggest that Jolie is poisoning their children against Pitt.

Such accusations show no signs of slowing down as the pair’s divorce proceedings continue. In August, People reported that Pitt was trying to get his ex-wife to sign an $8.5 million nondisclosure agreement. Jolie’s lawyers said it was “specifically designed to force her silence about his abuse and cover-up.”

As Jolie has continued to withdraw from Hollywood amid their legal battle—she’s said that she’s only sticking around Los Angeles because of their custody agreement over their teenage twins—Pitt kept working. He starred in films like 2022’s Bullet Train, which came out right after details of the jet incident did, and made $240 million worldwide.

But far more interesting than Pitt’s movie parts has been his producing work, which has played a significant role in how he has reframed his reputation. In 2001, he started Plan B productions with Aniston and his then-manager; when they divorced, he became the sole owner of the company. In 2006, Pitt started producing movies himself, first with films that fit well within his own wheelhouse, like The Departed, but as he became more ensconced in his evolving brand as Adoring Wife Guy, these projects changed, too. In 2009, while appearing in Inglourious Basterds, he also executive produced The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. In 2010, he produced Eat, Pray, Love. He also started producing more movies featuring and written by people of color, like critical darlings If Beale Street Could Talk, 12 Years a Slave, and Minari.

But it has been hard not to notice that since the FBI report detailing the plane incident was made public, Pitt’s production company has taken a special interest in movies about women. In 2022, he produced Women Talking, a woman-led and woman-directed movie inspired by a series of rapes that happened within a Mennonite community. He also produced She Said, an adaptation of the Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey book about the journalistic investigation into Weinstein.

The strangeness of someone like Pitt being involved in She Said—after being accused of abusing his wife, and having worked with Weinstein even after he learned about Weinstein’s harassment of Paltrow and Jolie—wasn’t lost on anyone when the movie was released. His involvement in the project now smells like light reputational laundering. She Said wasn’t a huge box-office hit, but it was nominated for awards by the Women Film Critics Circle and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. (It won Best Ensemble at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards.) Women Talking was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and writer-director Sarah Polley won for Best Adapted Screenplay. (Conversely, Women Talking was merely nominated for Best Ensemble at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards.)

As Pitt became an even more dominant power player in Hollywood, he simultaneously embarked on a personal transformation. In the time between his divorce from Jolie and her allegations that he abused her, Pitt publicly acknowledged his alcohol addiction issues, sitting down for a lengthy 2017 interview with GQ about his yearlong sobriety. He appeared on three different covers, all shot in national parks, all with Pitt looking a little like a chastened Tyler Durden: graying goatee, torso covered with a tornado tattoo, same bright blue eyes tearing up in one particular photo. His alleged assault of his ex-wife is, in the GQ story, referred to as “a reported altercation.” Pitt is framed as a pitiable figure: “Here he is, alone, a 53-year-old human father/former husband smack in the middle of an unraveled life, figuring out how to mend it back together.”

Getting sober—and talking about it—is a path that has been taken by countless famous men caught in a fire of their own making. For instance, Rob Lowe, whose career took a brief nosedive after he made a sex tape, at the age of 24, with a 22-year-old woman and a 16-year-old girl, recently celebrated 34 years of sobriety. A sobriety journey can be both a legitimate path for someone’s individual well-being and a clever way to rebrand oneself after being found guilty in, at minimum, the court of public opinion. It can be a triumph, while also serving as a distraction.

Pitt’s sobriety journey went hand in hand with a renewed interest in speaking about his parenting ethos. In the 2017 GQ interview, Pitt dances around the specifics of his sobriety while framing most of his concerns around his children and how they’ll manage with divorced parents. “I’m personally very retarded when it comes to taking inventory of my emotions,” he said. “And it’s hit me smack in the face with our divorce: I gotta be more. I gotta be more for them. I have to show them. And I haven’t been great at it.”

What the glossy magazines are still hesitant to bring up is that Pitt appears to be largely estranged from his children. In 2020, Jolie and Pitt’s son Pax allegedly wrote an Instagram story on Father’s Day calling Pitt a “world class asshole,” a “despicable person,” and a “fucking awful human being.” Several of the kids have dropped their dad’s last name. In November 2023, their daughter Zahara was announced by her sorority as “Zahara Marley Jolie.” Last May, it was reported that Vivienne had started using just Jolie as a last name. Shiloh dropped Pitt from her last name in August, right after turning 18. In August, Pax ended up in the ICU after an e-bike accident. “He hasn’t had any contact with Pax in years,” an anonymous source told People, “but he still very much cares.”

He may only be 60, but Pitt still represents a last vestige of Hollywood glamour. Pitt existed in the time of monoculture, where one movie—like Fight Club or Seven or Legends of the Fall—could dominate every conversation for weeks. Coupled with his universally good looks, his penchant for dating it girls of every ilk (the elegant Paltrow, the winning Aniston, the sexy Jolie), and his eventual fatherhood, he made for a celebrity you could cheer on. Even his sobriety plot offers us, his dutiful audience, a nice bow to tie together his redemption narrative. It feels good to root for someone who we think already deserves our affection.

The crux of the matter is mortifyingly simple: It’s painful for an audience to let go of a beloved cultural icon. Could someone this hot, this talented, and this charming be responsible for real harm? Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Jerry Seinfeld, and Johnny Depp have been accused of some form of abuse of power against women or girls, and yet all of them remain pretty bankable stars, not canceled so much as transformed into folk heroes to a very particular audience.

Pitt’s upcoming film Wolfs is classic Pitt/Clooney fare: Two fixers who normally operate alone are forced to work together on one complicated job. The publicity machine has been hot: In August, In Touch wrote about how supportive Clooney has been through his friend’s divorce. A few days after that, the outlet published another story about how much the two pals “check in on each other” despite growing apart during Pitt’s second marriage. People wrote about it, too. GQ put Pitt and Clooney on the cover again, with a PR-friendly interview about their three-decade-long friendship; Us Weekly aggregated the details. There was no mention of Pitt’s ongoing divorce, or the alleged estrangement between him and his children.

Pitt may be able to launder his reputation a thousand times through ex-wives disinterested in public squabbles, or summer blockbusters that everyone wants to see, or production work in support of female voices. But, as he gets older, and as the routine becomes more familiar, it’s an image of him that’s harder to buy. Nothing speaks louder than your own children united in their displeasure, disapproval, and disappointment.

Meanwhile, Pitt and his second ex-wife passed like ships in the night at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where they both had movies premiere earlier this month. Pitt went public with his thirtysomething girlfriend; Jolie gave interviews about despair.


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Monday, September 9, 2024



The New Brad and Angelina

By Fran Hoepfner

In 2007, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walked the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival together, in attendance for Pitt’s movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a melancholy western about ego and fading reputation. The film served as something of a launchpad for the two as film-festival darlings for the next few years. While they’d both seen a fair amount of mainstream, and even prestige, success in the early 2000s, their late-aughts run turned them into global and art-house superstars. They went — Jolie very pregnant with their twins — to Cannes for Jolie’s film Changeling in 2008, then back to Cannes in 2009 and 2011 with Pitt’s Inglourious Basterds and The Tree of Life, respectively. The pair then vanished from the international film-festival circuit until late August this year, when Jolie and Pitt returned to Venice separately, each with their own project, almost eight years after Jolie filed for divorce.

The former couple’s arrival on the Lido — a small island that hosts the event — was coordinated by festival artistic director Alberto Barbera, ensuring that they wouldn’t have to see each other, and it marked a new beginning for each of their public personas in the shadow of what has come to feel like a never-ending divorce. Though their separation was legally finalized in 2019, Pitt and Jolie have continued to feud over Château Miraval, the French winery they bought together in 2012. Upon their split, Jolie sold her shares to a subsidiary of the Stoli Group — the parent company of the vodka brand — which Pitt saw as an action that “sought to inflict harm.” (The sale blocked Pitt from obtaining majority-shareholder status.) It was only through the ensuing legal battle that the most shocking substance of the couple’s “irreconcilable differences” came to light: On a plane ride from France to California in 2016, Jolie’s filings alleged, an intoxicated Pitt had physically abused not only his wife, grabbing her by the head and shaking her, but two of their children, one of whom he choked and the other he struck in the face.

The details of this incident, which emerged in full in 2022, painted a vastly different picture from that of the Pitt who’d just a couple years before charmed his way through a successful Oscar campaign. He had spent the fall of 2019 and subsequent winter peacocking through joke-dense acceptance speeches and had reunited with his widely beloved ex-wife Jennifer Aniston backstage at the SAG Awards, maintaining what seemed like an effortlessly cool, semi-retired-dad energy (if said semi-retired dad were extremely handsome). Even the role for which he went on to win his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, played into his Elder Golden Boy persona: a no-frills former Hollywood stuntman, aging and hot — but without vanity — and wryly charismatic. (The character, somewhat ironically, suffers from the reputation of possibly killing his wife. Played for a laugh, of course.)

His then-shaky public relationship with his children, especially eldest Maddox, was framed in the media as a tragedy — for Pitt. As his Oscar campaign ramped up in the winter of 2020, the tabloids reported the actor’s apparent “heartbreak” when he was unable to make amends with his son during a trip to the U.K. for the BAFTAs. A few months after Pitt took home his Oscar gold, a screenshot from an Instagram Story posted by his son Pax made the rounds, in which he called his father a “world class asshole.” In the years since, all three of his daughters — Zahara, Shiloh, and Vivienne — have referred to themselves with the last name “Jolie,” no longer “Jolie-Pitt.” Shiloh made the change legal in June of this year. Pitt never retreated from the public eye, but his work has sharply declined. He had some financial success with movies like Bullet Train, but a failed Oscar run for Damien Chazelle’s Babylon placed him front row at the Golden Globes with nothing to do but smile at the winners all night. He began to betray a general world-weariness. In 2022, he admitted in a GQ interview that he saw his career on its “last legs”; the following year, he moved out of Hollywood to Carmel, California, a few hours up the coast.

Pitt’s return to Venice alongside George Clooney, with whom he stars in Jon Watts’s action-comedy Wolfs, was all smiles and jokes, appealing to a nostalgia for a time when the two headlined movies together — Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy and the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading — and typified a suave and macho but nonthreatening masculinity. A recent story in GQ profiled the two as a pair, playing up their warmth for each other and by extension Pitt’s warmth as a person: “George Clooney and Brad Pitt are Hollywood BFFs.” In the press for Wolfs generally, including the glossy article (set at the Miraval estate) and the press conference at Venice, Pitt has used Clooney as a type of shield: Clooney the family man, Clooney the caretaker, Clooney the role model. “George is probably the best at understanding, seeing the chessboard and the potential moves. I’ll call George on numerous occasions when things get bumpy,” Pitt told GQ. Pitt appeared on the red carpet for the first time with Ines de Ramon, his relatively age-appropriate, non-entertainment-industry girlfriend of almost two years, but in the company of Clooney and his wife, Amal, Pitt still appeared more like a third wheel, a shaggy dog in need of some leftovers.

Jolie, meanwhile, arrived to the festival alone, promoting her new film, Maria, by Chilean director Pablo Larraín. Larraín’s biopic of opera singer Maria Callas is his third starring an American woman taking on an affected upper-class accent — following Natalie Portman in Jackie and Kristen Stewart in Spencer — and Jolie’s first project of relative prestige as an actor since her self-directed appearance in 2015’s By the Sea, which also starred then-husband Pitt. Maria puts Jolie back at center stage (not quite literally, as the film is set in Callas’s final years, though Jolie trained in operatic singing for the role).

Jolie’s aloneness at the festival did not appear to be the steely and “strong independent woman” type one might have imagined for an older, divorced Jolie years ago, during her stints as a “wild child” in the ’90s or an untouchable superstar in the 2000s. An early press still for Maria features Jolie in a strangely vulnerable pose, nervous or wary, holding her hands to the side of her head. At Venice, Jolie looked humbled, though not in the salt-of-the-earth way attempted by her ex-husband. On the red carpet, clad in neutral tans and blacks, her famous lips coated in classic red, she beamed with a kind of wide-mouthed, toothy eagerness, a far cry from the statuesque mugging she was known for in the early years of her relationship with Pitt. In the press conference for Maria, she discussed a guardedness that she felt she and Callas shared: “I think the way I related to her was probably the part of her that is extremely soft and doesn’t have room in the world to be as soft as she was, as emotionally open as she truly was.” That some of Jolie’s walls have now been dropped, whether by choice or not, was never more apparent than during the standing ovation at the film’s premiere, when the actress visibly shook before beginning to weep. She seemed genuinely overwhelmed, shell-shocked, shielding her face with her hand.

The consistency of Pitt’s persona over the years — the lucky, nice guy from Missouri who just happens to be a movie star — has made it easy, perhaps, for audiences to feel like they know him, what he’s about. Jolie, in contrast, has always maintained a vague unknowable quality that has perpetuated her stardom. She took the brunt of the heat in the couple’s early days — as the nepo baby, as the edgy “other woman” — and for the entirety of her career, she has been plagued by criticisms of being too cool, too removed. But at Venice, the pair’s public roles finally reversed. Jolie seemed, as much as anyone clad in custom designer chiffon and jewelry from Cartier could, down to earth: a woman who has been through something and who is actually present. Pitt’s persona, however, appeared more hollow than it ever had before. His posing glared against the reality of his private life, and the truth of who he is was very far away.


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Wednesday, November 2, 2022



A majority of U.S. adults surveyed in a THR/Morning Consult poll still have a favorable perception of the actor — but some opinions changed when informed of the specific claims of the lawsuit.

BY MIA GALUPPO, NOVEMBER 2, 2022 6:40AM

As Paramount gears up for the December launch of Babylon, its big-budget prestige swing, the studio has to contest with headlines about its leading man, Brad Pitt. Instead of chatter about the star’s first awards hopeful since he won an Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the actor is facing accusations about a 2016 altercation on an airplane involving then-wife Angelina Jolie that have come to light amid a legal dispute over the French winery Château Miraval, which they had owned together.

A countersuit filed Oct. 4 by Jolie detailed the incident on a private plane during which Jolie says Pitt abused her and some of their children. The FBI launched an investigation over the incident in 2016 but declined to press charges, while a rep for Pitt stated that Jolie “continues to rehash, revise and reimagine” the altercation.

According to a THR/Morning Consult survey conducted Oct. 15 to 16 among a nationally representative sample of 2,211 adults in the U.S., the claims have not significantly damaged Pitt’s public image. There was, however, a slight change in opinion when respondents were informed of the claims. When first asked about whether respondents had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Pitt, 70 percent answered either “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable.” When asked a second time, after being prompted in the Morning Consult survey about Jolie’s abuse allegations directed toward Pitt, that combined number slipped to 65 percent.

Fewer women reported interest in seeing a film starring the actor compared with men, with 49 percent of women saying they were “somewhat” or “very” interested in seeing a film starring Pitt, compared with 56 percent of men. Breaking down responses by age, two-thirds of those 35-to-44 (66 percent) said they were “somewhat” or “very” interested in seeing a film starring Pitt, compared with 54 percent of those 18-to-34 and 50 percent of 45-to-64.

The perception of older audiences is important, considering the demo was seen as a driver behind the success of Pitt’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($142 million domestic) and Bullet Train ($103 million domestic).

Paramount recently scheduled Babylon — which also stars Margot Robbie and has a run time of about three hours and an expected R rating — for a Dec. 23 wide release, moving it up from a Christmas Day limited release with a January expansion. It will now share theaters with Avatar: The Way of Water, which opens wide Dec. 16, and the animated Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody, both out Dec. 21.

Insiders note Pitt remains a consistently bankable movie star and a direct path to a guaranteed green light, and the lawsuit and subsequent allegations will not change that. Still, the claims remain a more immediate “PR nightmare,” as one executive put it, that will likely lead to Pitt not being a major presence on the Babylon press tour. “You think Paramount is thrilled? No,” says one rival studio executive. “It could make press [for Pitt] hard, but the town will rally around Brad.”

THR/MORNING CONSULT


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Sunday, October 27, 2019


Ring, bracelets, necklaces, pendants




The bee ring -

and 4 necklaces with at least 3 pendants

Below, outside Houseago's studio 2 weeks ago.  He took the necklace with the big beads off but the rest may be the same.

Of the 8 bracelets he had on when he was in Washington, DC for Ad Astra, he is wearing 4 -- all of the ones in yellow gold plus the red tiger's eye:
Red tiger's eye
DY Fortune Heirloom link in 18K
bike chain
Spiritual Beads Skull in 18K

With only 4 instead of 6 or more, the tattoo is more visible.


The other 4 in Washington
Woven red nylon with black onyx
Black onyx
Shipwreck Chain
Faceted Beads in Labradorite

He drank tea or coffee the whole day



Thanks sofi and Jennypeachy's
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Monday, October 20, 2014





















By Press Association


Hollywood heart-throb Brad Pitt revealed the importance of educating his children about the effects of war as his latest movie Fury brought the BFI London Film Festival to a rousing close tonight.
The 50-year-old actor, who is father to six children with wife Angelina Jolie, plays US army sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier in the Second World War epic.
"My boy loves World War Two. He is interested in it and studies it," he said, seemingly referring to the couple's eldest child, 13-year-old Maddox.


"He plays a lot of video games so it's important for me that he understands that war is not glamorous. It has a lot of consequences. There are a lot of families who are hurt by it. So we talk quite often and openly about it."
Pitt was joined by his co-stars including Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Jason Isaacs, Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal along with writer and director David Ayer, as they walked the red carpet at the European premiere in London's Leicester Square.
The action movie, which follows a five-man crew of a US army Sherman tank during the last days of the Second World War, was shot in the UK.
Ayer said: "It's a privilege to close this festival. We shot in the UK so this closes the process."
The cast bonded over a gruelling six-day boot camp and their three-month preparations before shooting.
"Shooting this movie was not an enjoyable experience. It wasn't meant to be enjoyable - we are shooting a war movie and war is hell," Lerman, who plays assistant driver Norman Ellison, said.
"The boot camp was formative to the process. That was when we bonded and became a family and we really understood the meaning of what we were doing."
Bernthal, who portrayed Grady Travis, added: "It was rigorous but essential. I'm really grateful for it. It bonded us as a unit, it gave us a team and made us a family."
Earlier at a press conference, Pitt - who was also one of the film's producers - said the role had made him a "better" father.
"I learnt a lot from this film. We all walked away absolutely enriched," he said. "This role is a real study in leadership and learning to command respect and because of this, I am now a better father."
This year's LFF opened with The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as wartime codebreaker Alan Turing, with stars such as Jennifer Lawrence, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell and James McAvoy attending premieres of films such as Foxcatcher, Whiplash, Wild and The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby.
Fury opens in UK cinemas on October 22.


















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Saturday, October 18, 2014


A much more complete account of the press junket than what first appeared in an Australian outlet.  However, instead of presenting the interview clearly in a streamlined Q and A format, the reporter peppered it with needless and distracting prose -- most of which I edited out.  You can read the original at the link.

-- Fussy




Brad Pitt, life after the wedding





The husband of the newly minted Honorary Dame of the British Empire immediately apologized for being late as he sat down for the foreign press in Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Grill in New York.  The walls of the restaurant are lined with paintings by De Niro’s father.

Of their day in Buckingham Palace, Brad said, “That was just cool.  It was a lovely day for our family. We were offered the opportunity to meet afterwards and bring the kids in.  And to see the kids — I have never seen them that still and respectful in my whole life. To see them bow and say ‘Your Majesty’ and curtsy, was an absolute delight and just a lovely day for us.”

Congratulated on their recent wedding and told how their fans waited a long time for it, Brad quipped, “Yeah, us, too.”

Asked what had changed since that big day, the actor joked, “I feel like a married man. Yes, I do.”
 
Then he said, “We have six kids. We felt so beyond that (marriage) but our kids were asking, so we thought it would be a lovely thing to do with our family. It was all that. But I was surprised afterwards. It was more than just a ceremony. I was surprised at furthering the depth of commitment.”

After a few days, the newlyweds went back to work in Malta (which subs for France) where they are filming “By the Sea.” Angelina wrote and directs “By the Sea,” which is set in the mid-1970s and also stars Melanie Laurent.

“She’s tough as nails, you know that. There’s no hiding that. She wrote this beautiful, intimate, elegant European story about a couple dealing with grief. I am surprised what a challenging piece it is. I watch her set the shots and I am immensely proud. She knows what she’s doing, She’s got this; she’s good.”

“And there are several couples in it,” he continued. “There’s a couple who is just starting out (Melanie and another actor). There’s our couple who is 14 years in and is at that stage where (the questions are): "What is the next step, what do you do, having been through all your baggage and what’s left, where does it go from here?""

“And then there are these beautiful older men who run the café. It all takes place in a hotel room and in a café. As I said, it was really challenging. They (older men) are deeper into life, have experienced life, lost their wives and have a particular wisdom. It’s haunting. It’s really quite beautiful and elegant.”

Brad added, “Maddox is 13 and he’s a PA (production assistant) on our film now.”

On why they chose to live part of the year in the South of France, Brad replied, “The first idea was to get our kids to a place outside of all that (points at the window overlooking Greenwich Street suddenly teeming with paparazzi), that they can just be kids and explore.

“We also wanted everyone to learn another language. The kids started with French and they are all speaking French, so they expand their world view. And we wanted a European base, because we also want to be able to get to Africa and Asia. The idea was to get a European base to travel to some of the other areas. And we want the kids to see where Angie has to work.  As they travel the world and see how different people live and the conditions that people are challenged with, they are getting it and they will get it.”

On why they specifically chose the South of France, Brad explained, “We go by feeling, by instinct and it just felt right. My writer/director put a lot of French in the film we are doing now. 'Writer/director' being my wife.”
 
As to his fluency in French, he said, “I think it’s coming but I am determined to learn it.”

Asked about turning 50 last December and how it was being 12 years older than his wife, Brad playfully protested, “Eleven and a half, alright? Let’s get the record straight.”

Then he said, “We’re probably the same age, maturity-wise. That’s the way it works. But it doesn’t feel any different, does it? It’s great. I will take wisdom over youth any day.”

On possibly competing against each other in this awards season, he said, “I often end up (competing) with my friends. It’s great when my friends make it there. I feel the same (about ‘Unbroken’). She made an incredible movie. It’s big.  And her film is about the triumph of the human spirit against tremendous odds. I see the films as distinctly different.”

“I see ours more of a day in the life of a family, three and a half years into war,” he said. “They have been through Africa, France, Belgium and now they are in Germany.“It’s about where we seem to deal with the psychic damage.  By the way, there’s a great book, ‘On Killing,’ by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. It really helped my approach, going into the film.”

"Hers is Louis Zamperini, this boy who came from nothing and went against really great odds. It’s a triumph of the human spirit. It’s very inspiring in that way.”

“But we are not pitted against each other. I hope it gets everything. There are amazing performances by Jack O’Connell and Miyavi, who is an amazing Japanese musician. Miyavi turns in his first role and it’s pitch-perfect. It’s worth seeing.”

Angelina told us in an earlier interview that while she was shooting “Unbroken” in Australia, he was filming “Fury” in the United Kingdom. The separation and making WWII films inspired them to write love letters to each other by hand.

Brad said, “Normally, we never work at the same time. Schedule-wise, we got it all wrong and we found ourselves having to work at the same time. But it was a unique experience for us to be both studying the war—she working in the Pacific theater and ours in the European theater.

“Of course, we got e-mail and Skype but we thought it might be interesting to just write letters as they had done at that time. They were gone for great amounts of time without communication with their loved ones. We did that and I will tell you what’s amazing—we have lost that form of communication. You do communicate in a different way. It was an interesting and lovely surprise.”
 
“Fury” features an extended dinner scene in which the “dysfunctional family” of five spends time in the home of a couple of surviving German women in a bombed-out town. This gentle episode erupts into an explosive “family” situation.

“Dave has this uncanny knack of putting us in a situation and learning our strengths and weaknesses and then pushing up against those to get a response from us in the scene,” Brad said of this scene. “That was near the end of the film. We had been together three months training into the film so we were a very tight group.

“When I look at the film, I see a dysfunctional family. I see a wartime scenario of dealing with all the traumas of war and all the psychological baggage that comes with the horrors of war. That scene took two days—it was like with a pack of wolves. From ‘Wardaddy’s’ point of view, he is the tank commander, the leader so he can’t show his weakness. So where does he release?

“The idea behind the scene is that he is looking for some semblance of quiet, peace and humanity. He brings the young boy (Logan’s Norman) along as well. Then his ‘family’ comes in and they won’t let him have it. So when we were in the takes, they were on me. They didn’t make it easy.

“And that was our relationship throughout the film. Meaning we would do the same on their takes. If it was Shia’s take, we would all come at him. Everyone had their turn throughout the film. That day, that scene was my turn. During the (shooting of the) dinner scene, by the way—that was my (50th) birthday.”

As for the dinners in the Jolie-Pitt household, Brad said, “We always try to have dinner together. It’s our time to talk about the day and what everyone is feeling. But yeah, everyone has had that one dysfunctional holiday dinner with their family and maybe not to that degree as in the movie. And I am not going to sell out my family but everyone has had it.

“They are usually nice,” Brad emphasized about family dinners in his house. “We talk about everything—it goes wherever it goes. Some dinners involve talking about why people die and what you want to get out of this life. Other dinners involve singing Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Balls in Your Mouth’ song. So it can be anything.”

On the boot camp in preparation for the film, Brad said, “I walked in with (the thought), we always talk about respect for our soldiers and our young men and women and what we ask them to do and that’s absolutely goddamned right. But I have such a deeper understanding and appreciation of their preparation, mentally and physically."

“We are actors. We are tourists in their world for a short amount of time but to see the depth, mentally and physically, of what they go through, to understand what is being asked of them and what they are putting on the line for us—I just have to say that I have immense respect for them returning to civil society. It’s not an easy thing, even with all of their limbs. I am just quite moved.”
 
On being cooped up in the tank for weeks of filming, Brad said, “It’s actually quite peaceful in the tank. It’s like when you put your head underwater in a swimming pool. Even though there are five of us crammed in this tin can and it stinks, you get used to that pretty quickly. By the third day, that doesn’t really mean anything.

“There’s nothing ergonomical in a tank but you find your little place between the bolt and the turret ring and a little place to put your coffee. It becomes a home and these guys, they lived in it for months at a time and they did everything there. I don’t have to go into detail. When I mean everything, they did everything in there."


 PITT, who turned 50 last year, says he “will choose maturity over youth any day.” RUBEN V. NEPALES


“But the tank has this strange, almost womb-like [quality]. There were some days when I would go in in the morning and I wouldn’t come out until the end of the day. I had lunch brought up there. I loved my tank.”

“By the way, Maddox knows more about tanks. I went to him when we first started, to understand more.”

Playing the leader made Brad discover “that I don’t suck at it. This one was a particular training in leadership. The tank commander is responsible for his guys, their morale. It was a really interesting study in leadership.

“Like as a father, sometimes you let them have their room and sometimes you have to put the clamps on. It’s all that. You have to know when they need to vent, when they need to get in line and get in order. I was the oldest one of the bunch, too. So they were looking at me for some kind of guidance.”

Brad does not want to be a director like his wife, who has already lined up her next project, “Africa.” “I don’t have any aspirations to direct,” he claimed. “It’s so time-consuming. I have aspirations to do some other things—in design work.”

Brad, who won an Oscar as a producer of last year’s Best Picture winner “12 Years a Slave,” explained why being a producer was fulfilling: “At the end of the year, there’s this batch of movies that either spoke to us or didn’t. To be able to contribute to culture in that way is a real privilege to me and something I don’t take lightly. So I am very specific about the stories that I put out.”

As to what he attributed his growth as an actor to, Brad answered, “Craft. With time you get to develop it. There are guys who are smart and make their way through it. Shia and Logan are certainly among them.

Since Bernthal played Shane Walsh in the first two seasons of “The Walking Dead,” the talk veered toward “World War Z 2.” “Jon and I certainly had a laugh over our tolerance for zombies,” Brad said. “Yes, there is one in the works and we will see if we’ll figure it out.”

“I love those boys,” he said of Jon, Shia, Michael and Logan. “I love Bernthal—he’s that guy on set that has everyone’s back. He’s a beautiful guy and I hope he gets immense opportunities.”

Looking forward, Brad said, “I am pretty clear about how I want to live my life and what I want for my kids, my family and my wife. That determines everything. I have never been one of those guys who think about the five-year-plan and the 10-year-plan. I have always gone by instinct. That’s been my guide. It’s just improving on themes, film, fatherhood, as a husband, partner. We spend so much of our life trying to shake our own personal haunts. I like that about getting older. I still have design aspirations and things that I want to mess around with.”

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Thursday, October 16, 2014







 Michele Manelis

A LINE of paparazzi wait outside Manhattan’s Tribeca Grill, the famed upmarket restaurant part-owned by Robert De Niro, while Brad Pitt sits inside to chat about his upcoming WWII saga, Fury. 
 
Despite sporting facial hair circa mid-1970s replete for his upcoming movie, By the Sea, written and directed by his multi-tasking wife (who was recently awarded the title of honorary Dame by the Queen, no less), this father-of-six, at age 50, is indelibly handsome.

And despite his unmitigated fame and success, as far as interview subjects go, he’s the same person he’s always been — a boy from Oklahoma, raised in rural Missouri who made good. Throughout his high wattage relationships with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, and of course, a five-marriage to Jennifer Aniston leading up to his relationship and marriage to Angelina Jolie, he’s always maintained a casual, low-maintenance demeanour.

Q. You had to speak a lot of German in this movie. That’s not easy.
A. I was sweatin’ it. I have a fondness for the language; I actually find it quite beautiful, especially when spoken softly. It’s just got a beautiful music to it for me. But I want to get it right.

Q. Like your role in Inglourious Basterds, you were there killing Nazis. Did you visit the Museum of Tolerance and places like that to get the feel of the time and of the situation?
A. I have been. We had the great opportunity to sit down with a lot of veterans who were in the war and experienced it, from Battle of the Bulge to lesser-known battles. And our tanks were so inferior to the Panzer division and they could punch right through our tanks, but we threw numbers at them, which means a lot of people were killed, these were death traps and a lot of people burned up in them and died horrifically. So by the end of the war, we were throwing kids in, which is the Logan Lerman character, who had no experience. But we did have numbers, and we did have an amazing engineering team behind that would pull them back in, patch them back together and send them back out. And I got so much from the veterans who were very giving in sharing their stories, and our goal was to get it right for them.

Q. You’re going to be competing with Angelina in this awards season with her WWII film, Unbroken.
A. She made an incredible movie; it’s big and her film is about the triumph of the human spirit against tremendous odds. I see the films as distinctly different, I see ours more of a day in the life of a family, three and a half years into war, that have been through Africa, France, Belgium, and now they are in Germany. And again, hers is something different. Hers is Louis Zamperini, this boy who came from nothing and against really great odds and it’s a triumph of the human spirit and it’s very inspiring in that way. But we are not pitted against each other and I hope it gets everything ... It’s worth seeing.

Q. When you look back on your youth, doing commercials in Japan for Levis jeans — what do you remember about that time?
A. Listen, I had never been on a plane until I was 24, 25, so everywhere I got to travel to, whether it was the Netherlands or whether it was Tokyo, it was all such an experience, so exciting for me, so at that time, I remember just soaking in everything I could see and now what we try to do is to indulge in the country as a family, so when we get to go, we get to carve out days where we experience more of the culture and the country.

Q. You’re living in France much of the time. How is your French these days? And why France?
A. My French is pretty good. And the first idea is to get our kids to a place where it’s outside of all that, that they can just be kids and explore and we also wanted everyone to learn another language and the kids just started with French and they are all speaking French, so they expand their worldview. And we wanted a European base, because we want to be able to get to Africa and Asia the same trip. But the idea was to get a European base to travel to some of the other areas, and we want the kids to see where Angie has work.

Q. And why the South of France?
A. We go by feeling, we go by instinct and it just felt right. It just felt right. And I think my French is pretty good. My writer/director put a lot of French in the film we are doing now ... My writer/director being my wife. [laughs] And, I think it’s coming, but I am determined, I am determined to learn it.

Q. Now that you’re 50, when you think about going back to the age of 25 and on the plane for the first time, what did you imagine you’d be doing at the grand old age of 50? Are you now as confident as you will ever be?
A. Yeah, I am pretty clear about how I want to live my life and what I want from my kids and my family and my wife and that determines everything, and I have never been one of those guys who thinks about the five-year plan and the 10-year plan; I have always gone by instinct and have great confidence in that instinct, and developed that radar of what feels right, what doesn’t feel right, and that’s been my guide.

Q. Are you comfortable in the role of leader of the platoon? Shia LaBeouf has said that they all wanted to get your attention.
A. Well that was kind of the dynamic of the family: us being together, going to boot camp, sparring together ... the architecture of a boot camp, of a training session for a soldier, is brilliantly laid out and it tears you down, it forces you to work together, to bond together, to solve a problem, it tears you down again and it builds you up, psychologically, it’s a very interesting structure. It’s very cool.

Q. How do you feel being 12 years older than your wife? How is that dynamic?
A. Eleven and a half, alright? Let’s get the record right! But probably the same age, maturity-wise. That’s the way it works. But anyone who is there, it doesn’t feel any different, does it? It’s great. And I have said this before but I will take wisdom over youth any day.

Q. Being in the tank for so long in this very close environment, what thoughts went through your head?
A. You know, it was an almost womblike sense and experience in it and there’s some days I would go in the morning and I wouldn’t come out until the end of the day. And had the lunch brought up there and some days were like that. I love my tank!

Q. With everything you’ve accomplished, what goals do you have yet to achieve?
A. It’s just improving; improving on themes, film, fatherhood, as a husband, partner ... we spend so much of our life trying to shake our own personal haunts and I like that about getting older and I still have design aspirations and things that I want to mess around with.

Q. How have you grown as an actor since the beginning of your career?
A. Craft. With time you get to develop craft and it’s my worry for the younger guys because they are eating up so much, that they are used up so quickly before they are able to develop craft and I mean there are guys who are smart and making their way through it and Shia is certainly one of them and Logan is one of them, but it’s craft. And really learning and understanding tone because in a scene, a film, is all about tone. What is the tone of that scene? And that’s the puzzle we are always solving, and that’s my interest in still being in front of the camera and solving that puzzle, it’s tone.

Q. One of your co-stars Jon Berenthal, who is in Walking Dead and you did World War Z — did you do much zombie comparisons?
A. Yeah, we certainly had a laugh for our tolerance for zombies. But yes, there is one in the works and we will see if we figure it out, no promises yet, but we are trying and I love those boys, I love Berenthal, he’s that guy on set that has got everyone’s back and he’s a beautiful guy and I hope he gets immense opportunities.

Q. On a lighter note. Congrats on your wedding. The world waited a long time for that.
A. Yeah, us too. [laughs]

Fury is in Australian cinemas from October 23.


















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Sunday, September 28, 2014



GQ

Meet GQ’s November cover star, Brad Pitt

By Nick Carvell Photos by John Balsom | Styling by Julie Ragolia | Grooming by Mira chai Hyde 29 September 14

Here, see an exclusive preview of Brad Pitt's cover shoot along with some choice quotes from our interview - and be sure to pick up the issue to read it in full this coming Thursday.



On marriage
"I wouldn't say [marriage is] just a title. There's more to it than that."

On what he thinks his friend George Clooney meant when he recently called Pitt "unreachable"
"Well, you know, George is extremely accessible. He's one of our best representatives. He's funny as shit.  He's a joy to be around. I guess maybe I'm more of a miserable bastard. [laughs]. I'm a bit of a loner you know?  I'm more quiet by nature.  And coming from, you know, hillbilly country, I'm probably more reserved."

On choosing work
"I'm actually very snobbish about directors. I have to say no all the time. 'No' is the most powerful word in our business. You've got to protect yourself… To leave home, it's got to be worth leaving. It's got to be worth it."

On Shia LaBeouf and his commitment to acting
"Oh, I love this boy. He's one of the best actors I've ever seen. He's full-on commitment, man. He's living it like no one else, let me tell you. I've been fortunate to work with a lot of great actors. He's one of the best I've seen."

On how Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf almost came to blows on set (for Fury) with fellow actor Scott Eastwood, when he spat tobacco on the tank they were all in
"We were driving down the road, I'm in the turret, Shia is at the other turret, and Scott is on the back, spitting juice. And I'm starting to get pissed off, I'm starting to get hot, because this is our home, he's disrespecting our home, you know? So I said, in the scene with the cameras rolling, 'You're going to clean that shit up.' Shia clocks it, and you have to understand, we've been through severe boot camp already, we've been through a lot in this tank. Shia saw it and felt the same - he's disrespecting our home. So Shia had the same reaction I did and started having some words… then I had to get in after the cameras were rolling and explain it to Scotty, you know… The funny thing is, when we got home at the end of the day and read the script, it said Scotty's character is 'chewing tobacco and spitting it on the back of the tank'. He was just doing as instructed in the script! So we were the knobs in the end…"

On purposefully slowing down his acting career
"I've been slowing down for a while now. And slowly transitioning to other things. And, truthfully, I do want to spend more time with my kids before they're grown up and gone."

On considering a TV role
"They're doing great stuff on television. And we [Plan B] have a few television ideas ourselves. So yes, I'd love to do one."

On not being on Twitter
"Listen, I see a benefit in it. You could, you know, combat the misconceptions of the misquotes immediately. And if I'd have had that in my younger days, I'd have used it… because I felt quite used, and completely misunderstood, and misread, and not given the benefit of the doubt. You know, I felt that a lot in my first years. I would have brought some logic to the table, and brought it immediately. But now, at this point, I don't want to bother with it."

On whether he's happy
"I've always believed happiness is overrated, you know? It's those difficult times that inform the next wonderful time, and it's a series of trade-offs, of events, of wins and losses."

GQ's November issue goes on sale in print and as a digital edition that you can download for your iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire or Android device this Thursday (2 October).










Like all superstars, Brad Pitt has taken his hits: from the press, from the studios and, while making his latest film, Fury, even fellow actors took a swing. In this exclusive and candid interview, Hollywood's strong, silent type breaks cover to talk family life past and present, the perils of living in a tank for four months and the power of the word 'no'

Brad Pitt is clear about the film that affected him the most. He was 13, living in Springfield, Missouri, which he'll later freely describe to me as "hillbilly country". He remembers his childhood fondly, but it was notable for its sternness. His parents were strict Baptists - he remembers days sitting in church dreaming of letting loose a yelp to break the suffocating solemnity. He remembers imagining himself suddenly standing up in front of everyone and screaming, "It was me! It was me! It was me!"
Needless to say, he never did. The film he went to see was R-rated, "and cinemas were very strict back then". So, ever the innovator, he bought a ticket for a PG, acted like he needed to go to the loo, then, when the ticket guy turned his back, snuck in.

The film would never quite be regarded as a cinematic masterpiece - this isn't that story - but what struck him was the life it portrayed. It was Saturday Night Fever, and he was mesmerised. Look at this family, he thought - a big, boisterous, gregarious New York brood, forever hitting each other and yelling the house down. Chaos, sure, but what fun chaos. Ferocious, you bet, but what vital ferocity. And more, what love. What heart-on-sleeve love they all had for each other. Partly, it was so different from what he knew - "I was taught from one book [the Bible] and one book only," he's said. "It didn't sit right" - but also, he knew, all the way back then, it was the life he wanted for himself. A big family. Semi-chaos. And the kind of outsize love that often comes with bruises.
Years ago, when he was still single, Pitt used to have a recurring dream that someone else was forever using his toothbrush.
He thinks, he's said, it wasn't that complicated: it was a dream about fame. He had a few of those. Fame didn't always sit right with him in the early years. Now, he tells me, most of his dreams are about fatherhood - and his fears regarding the rambunctious brood he has with Angelina Jolie, from twins Knox and Vivienne (both six) to adopted son Maddox (12), six kids in all, a "cacophony" when they're all at home, and one he misses dearly when he's away.


"Yeah," he says, simply. "It's always about the safety of my kids." For his latest film, Fury - in which Pitt plays the leader of a weary tank crew at the end of the Second World War, who find themselves, over 24 hours, forced into one last battle - it was especially tough. Pitt was shooting in the UK, Jolie was in Australia about to direct Unbroken (about former Olympic track star Louis Zamperini and the two-and-a-half years he spent in a Japanese prisoner of war camp) and they couldn't get together.
"We always hopscotch, but this was the first time we couldn't make it work. Angie had to start her film in Australia, and I was starting here in England, so the kids would come back and forth.
Some would be there, and some would be with me. And we'd be flying back to see each other, for, you know, just a day - 24 hours R&R. We really felt it."
They began writing each other letters, "Because, you know, that was the way to communicate, and because we were on different time zones, on the opposite ends of the world, those letters turned into a beautiful way to communicate - to be more open, in some ways, than ever before."
But still, he felt it keenly. To be deprived, for months on end, of that loving chaos he had built for himself; the life he had always wanted, ever since sneaking into that cinema 37 years before.
The day before GQ meets Pitt, it is announced that he and Jolie, after an engagement that lasted nine years - and a decade to the day since they met on Mr And Mrs Smith - finally married, in a private ceremony at the Château Miraval in the village of Correns, in the south of France. All their children were in attendance.
 "I wouldn't say [marriage is] just a title," he says. "There's more to it than that."
Yet what the gossip magazines won't know - what the wedding cover story of People couldn't guess at - is the seven months of torture he'd go through making Fury before he got there.
The boot camp that broke him. The on-set fights he would have to split up. The days and nights eating, shitting and sleeping in the tank for the sake of authenticity. A director who made them literally fight each other, who waged psychological war, who made them as close as brothers so they could hurt each other as only brothers can. The small matter of Shia LaBeouf pulling his own teeth out.
But also, the remarkable film they ended up making. And the genuine bond that came from it.
Pitt both is and isn't the movie star you expect to meet.
His clothes, when GQ meets him, have that careful air of designer scruffy, suggesting a studied rejection of all but the most essential suit-and-tie occasions. Over a dark-grey V-neck tee, he sports an open grey shirt, the undone cuffs of which spill out from under his casual grey jacket, which, like most of his clothes, seems transatlantically crumpled. The only concession to his A-lister status: an orange trilby so bright it could land planes.
We meet in the rather unglamorous locale of the Tank Museum in Dorset, sitting at a table in front of the Sherman tank used in
Fury. Just GQ, the biggest film star on the planet and 30 tonnes of metal killing machine.
In person, Pitt is engaging, endlessly polite, but fidgety. As he talks, his eyes sometimes dart around the hanger where we sit; but when he listens, the eye contact is direct - they widen and absorb, both vulnerable and intrigued.
"There is almost a shyness to him," Fury director David Ayer tells me over the phone. "He's a bit of a contradiction. He has a lot of ­presence, and can be a very strong-willed individual, but there's a quietness about him."
"Somebody in his position might cause people to be inhibited around him," adds Bennett Miller, who directed him in 2011's Moneyball, for which Pitt would receive his third Oscar nomination, "but actually the opposite is true.
He's very easy-going. You're your best self around him." Put another way: he may not have the patter of a George Clooney - that reservoir of easy, pre-spun charm - but, in many ways, it only makes him more likable, because one thing is clear: Pitt is not putting on an act for anyone.
Clooney - a good close friend - recently called Pitt "unreachable" in a way that he himself is not. What does he think Clooney meant by that?
"Huh." He thinks for a second. "Well, you know, George is extremely accessible. He's one of our best representatives. He's funny as shit. He's a joy to be around. I guess maybe I'm more of a miserable bastard." He laughs. "I'm a bit of a loner, you know? I'm more quiet by nature. And coming from, you know, hillbilly country, I'm probably more reserved."
You can call it fame. Or power. But to Brad Pitt, it's "juice".
The phrase isn't an accident. Rather, it's what you get when you squeeze your fame and power for all they're worth. Some film stars use their fame to get bigger cheques. But the enduring appeal of Pitt perhaps comes down to this: he uses his to make better films.
It's why he is, in many ways, an anomaly. He's unmistakably a leading man, but look at his roles, and - the odd Mr And Mrs Smith or ­Troy-shaped misstep aside - he has the CV of a Philip Seymour Hoffman-esque character actor.
The roster runs from cult classics (True Romance, Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys) to indie triumphs (Snatch, Killing Them Softly); from auteur passion projects (The Tree Of Life, Burn After Reading, Inglourious Basterds) to Oscar-bait biopics (The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Moneyball). It's a career - taking in directors from Quentin Tarantino to Terrence Malick; David Fincher to the Coen brothers - that defies, in many ways, the laws of Hollywood gravity.


For Pitt, none of the typical "one-for-me, one-for-them" trade-off between quieter, intelligent fare and multiplex pleasers, all designed to maintain an A-list status. For Pitt, they're all for him. "I'm actually very snobbish about directors," he says. "I have to say no all the time. No is the most powerful word in our business. You've got to protect yourself."
But most importantly, he adds, "To leave home, it's got to be worth leaving. It's got to be worth it."
Bennett Miller remembers meeting Pitt when they were discussing
Moneyball. It was a tough sell - a film about baseball sabermetrics that had already fallen apart under a different director.
"I pitched him my version of the movie, and he just said, 'OK, let's do that.' I remember saying, you know, it's not exactly a studio treatment, and I know this thing had trouble before, so what makes you think we can do this at a studio?"
Pitt's answer was simple. "Because I'm here to protect the process. Any time you run into any interference, I'll be here to make sure we make the movie that we're talking about making."
"You can imagine," adds Miller, "somebody in that position abusing that power, or being reckless, or being short-sighted about it. But he was a protector. There is a real elegance to how he wields his power." It was a lesson the actor learnt early on. Pitt still remembers on Legends Of The Fall (1994) the producers cut his favourite scene, as it was voted "most-hated" after a test-screening. He demanded to see the ­marketing report, only to realise the scene was also the second "most-liked". "Guys," he said, "this is exactly why we're here. We want to evoke emotion - not agreement."
For Se7en, his next film, he finally had "juice", so requested two conditions written into his contract - that the severed head stayed in the box at the end, and that his character shot the killer; a red-blooded crime of passion rather than the heroism of restraint. And he's been using his juice ever since.
"I safeguard a lot," he says. "Whether it's making sure The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford stays the full title, or something more serious about the cut. With test screenings, and scenes that are polarising or uncomfortable, you're asking people to analyse as soon as the lights come on. It's impossible! Impossible! I mean, it took me weeks to be able to tell you why There Will Be Blood is one of the movies of the decade."
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He even uses his juice for films he doesn't star in. His production company, Plan B Entertainment, has a mandate to "get difficult ­material that might not otherwise get made to the screen", and is ­responsible for Oscar winners ranging from The Departed to 12 Years A Slave (in which he had a bit part), along with the vast majority of films in which he takes the lead. Just last month, Pitt won a producing Emmy for TV movie
The Normal Heart. Not that you'd know it - he didn't set foot near the stage to collect the award.
When Pitt signed up to Fury, he knew what he was letting himself in for. To be able to fully embody the semi-broken men at the tail-end of a long war, director David Ayer (Training Day, End Of Watch) planned to genuinely put them through hell. For starters, he sent them to a boot camp, run by Navy Seals.
"They were successful in getting every one of us to break down," says Jon Bernthal, who plays the tank's loader. "To reach the limit, physically and emotionally, where we wanted to quit. When you have a group of people who have cracked psychologically, it's amazing where you can go. They got us to do things that we can't talk about. And I'm not sure I'm proud of some of those things."
Pitt, says Bernthal, threw himself in. "Look, he's Brad Pitt, he doesn't have to do the shit that we have to do. But the thing I'll take away is that the colder it got, the wetter it got, the more miserable it got, the happier he was. I mean, we were pissing and shitting right in front of each other."
Next, Ayer made them fight each other.
"On the first day, I had to spar him [Pitt], and it was like, it's Brad, so what do you do?" says Bernthal. Pitt ended up kicking him in the nuts three times. "And so I had to tell him not to after the third time. Then I gave him one in the stomach, and he said it was the hardest he'd ever been hit. But again: the fact he was willing to jump in there speaks volumes."

Finally, Ayer made them live in the tank. To live, eat, and, well, ­everything, in the tank. "I remember Brad said, this is going to start smelling very bad in here very fast."
By the time they started shooting - after four long months of preparation - Ayer had them where he wanted them. Which is to say, broken. But, also, bonded - for better or worse, as a family.
They talked a lot, says Pitt, about their "tank family". And
­everything - for better and for worse - that comes with that.
"David had this sick idea," says Bernthal, "that the more we learnt about each other, the more we could hurt each other. There would be times where the camera would be on and he would just say
[of another cast member], 'Go after him.' And this was not to say,
'I f***ing hate you', or something, but really go for the jugular, to point out the things that only you know they're the most insecure about, that hurts them the most."
"It was," Pitt says, "very intense."
Later, I ask the 22-year-old Logan Lerman, who plays the green new recruit the seasoned tank crew must swiftly train, about this process.
"God," Lerman says softly. "I wish I could share some of the things I regretfully said to these guys I respect... But it was some f***ed-up shit."
Sometimes, Ayer would whisper something in someone's ear to set them off. For Bernthal, who had recently left two young babies at home, Ayer said something tragic had happened to them.
"I don't know if I should say this, but yeah, I had talked about being away from my wife and kids. And in the first scene, David came over and started whispering in my ear, saying something terrible had happened... And, look, there's willingness on my part to go to this place." But, he adds, "I don't look back on it as being fun. It was not a fun movie to work on. It took an emotional toll on all of us." "I am ruthless as a director," says Ayer when I speak to him later. "I will do whatever I think is necessary to get what I want. There are hurt feelings and bruises sometimes. But I think a director's mistake is to be passive and let the same thing unfold again and again and again." He would even do it to Pitt.
"You know," says Pitt. "When the bell rings, we were in the ring.
And we wanted to be pushed off our balance in a way, so you're constantly thinking of new scenarios to make it personal to yourself."

What did he whisper in his ear? "Many things," he says. "But none I would like to mention."
Even among this controlled madness, Shia LaBeouf, who plays the tank's gunner, stood out alone. For starters, for authenticity's sake, he decided to pull out a tooth.
"Well, I mean, he didn't do it himself," clarifies co-star Lerman. "He did go to a dentist and asked them to pull his tooth out, but, yeah, what an odd request..."
Then, dissatisfied with the cuts on his face by the make-up department, LaBeouf again decided to take matters into his own hands.
"We were in make-up," remembers Lerman, "and they were putting cuts on Shia, and I said, 'Yeah, yeah, it looks good', and Shia was like, 'No, it doesn't look real.' Then he walks out into the hallway, and says, 'Hey man, wanna see something fun? Check this out...' And he takes out a knife and cuts his face. And for the whole movie he kept opening these cuts on his face. That's all real."
Didn't Lerman freak out? "No, I f***ing loved it!"
Then there was the matter of Shia not washing for the entire time. "But the story being told in the press that there was any problem on our part," says Bernthal, referencing a Daily Mail story that suggested the rest of the cast forced him to move to a different hotel due to the stench, "is completely false."
In fact, so committed was LaBeouf - and, it must be said, all the cast praise him unreservedly - that not only did he genuinely learn his role as turret operator to expert levels, but operated it at all times, even for long-shots.
"He really spent every moment on that set," says Lerman. "He's the guy operating the turret in every shot, even when you don't need to be in there as an actor. You know, you can have somebody else inside! But he was there every day, for every shot."
LaBeouf was certainly committed, I later say to Pitt.
"Oh, I love this boy," he says. "He's one of the best actors I've ever seen. He's full-on commitment, man. He's living it like no one else, let me tell you. I've been fortunate to work with a lot of great actors. He's one of the best I've seen."
Others, however, were not so enamoured. When I speak to Scott Eastwood, the 28-year-old son of Clint, who has a minor role as a soldier, he remembers LaBeouf as a "complete pain in the ass". Indeed, they almost came to blows.
"I was in the middle of a scene with Brad Pitt, and I was chewing tobacco," says Eastwood. "He didn't like what I was doing, so he said I couldn't be spitting tobacco on his tank, and he told me to clean it up. I pretty much told him to f*** off, and Brad had to break it up."
When I later ask Pitt about this, he remembers it differently.
 "Well," he says, "it requires a setup."
They were all sparring every day, says Pitt. They'd bonded by this point - and not just with each other, but with the tank, too. "And something happens - it becomes very personal. You know, that's
my tank."
Pitt says he was actually the first to tell Eastwood not to spit tobacco on the tank.
"Yeah, that came from me. We were driving down the road, I'm in the turret, Shia is at the other turret, and Scott is on the back, spitting juice. And I'm starting to get pissed off, I'm starting to get hot, because this is our home, he's disrespecting our home, you know? So I said, in the scene with the cameras rolling, 'You're going to clean that shit up.' Shia clocks it, and you have to understand, we've been through severe boot camp already, we've been through a lot in this tank. Shia saw it and felt the same - he's disrespecting our home. So Shia had the same reaction I did, and started having some words." But it soon got out of hand, "then I had to get in after the cameras were rolling, and explain it to Scotty, you know..."
Put another way: he had to act dad and separate the kids.
Besides, Pitt adds, "The funny thing is, when we got home at the end of the day and read the script, it said Scotty's character is
'chewing tobacco and spitting it on the back of the tank'. He was just doing as instructed in the script! So we were the knobs in the end..."
Extreme filming aside, says Pitt, the story of Fury is a simple one. It's one of an established family having to adapt to Logan Lerman's new arrival. Or, as Pitt himself puts it, "It's raising a son. Raising a son in one day. And that is very painful for a father."
It is perhaps no coincidence that Fury is about family.
Look at Pitt's recent films, and it's a recurring theme, from the authoritarian father in The Tree Of Life, to the father just trying to save his family in World War Z, to the father who, at the very end of Moneyball, gives up the job of a lifetime in order to be closer to his daughter. It's also, perhaps, no coincidence that he chose to go to these extremes in
Fury now, while he still can. After all, Pitt is now 50.
He's married. And, he says, he wants to enjoy his children growing up. He is, he says, purposefully slowing down his acting career.
"Absolutely. I've been slowing down a while now. And slowly transitioning to other things. And, truthfully, I do want to spend more time with my kids before they're grown up and gone. So, yes, absolutely."
He's considered TV - he was "in discussions", he says, for the second series of True Detective, but it didn't go any further than that - and he certainly wouldn't rule out a TV role in the future.
"They're doing great stuff on television. And we [Plan B] have a few television ideas ourselves. So, yes, I'd love to do one."
He's never been on Twitter, and now, he says, doesn't feel the need.
"Listen, I see a benefit in it. You could, you know, combat the misconceptions or the misquotes immediately. And if I'd have had that in my younger days, I'd have used it."
Why in his younger days?
"Because I felt quite used, and completely misunderstood, and misread, and not given the benefit of the doubt. You know, I felt that a lot in my first years. I would have brought some logic to the table, and brought it immediately. But now, at this point, I don't want to bother with it." It is, he says, one of his worries about younger actors: the pressures they face.
 "I worry for the younger guys. There are so many demands on them outside the craft. The business tends to suck 'em up, chew 'em up very quickly and spit them out before they've even had time to hone their craft. And they have a bigger challenge, for making a long-run game out of this."
Again, this is Pitt as father-figure, worrying for the new generation. And again, this is the guy who has a recurring dream, which is almost always the same, which is almost always about the safety of his kids.
For now, there's a plane to catch. And, from there, to Angelina and his ­joyously noisy rabble of kids. Back in 2011, lamenting the time he has to spend away from his family, Pitt said of Jolie, "We should be doing films together - that's what we should be doing. We should be doing ­everything together, and then we could work less."
He's just about start a film with his new wife on the Maltese coast.
Called By The Sea, it is, he says, "something that doesn't normally come our way - it's very interesting, an almost European-flavoured film". And also, "It basically takes place in a hotel room and a café." He's finally put his plan into action.
"Yup. That's part of that plan."
I ask if he's happy. He thinks for a second.
"I've always believed happiness is overrated, you know? It's those difficult times that inform the next wonderful time, and it's a series of trade-offs, of events, of wins and losses."
Of the love that comes with bruises.


Originally published in the November 2014 issue of British GQ.































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