For his WaPo NASA event today he was a veritable walking David Yurman catalogue:
8 bracelets:
Woven red nylon with black onyx
DY Fortune Heirloom link in 18K
Red tiger's eye
Black onyx
bike chain
Shipwreck Chain
Spiritual Beads Skull in 18K
Faceted Beads in Labradorite
The
Petrvs Bee Signet ring -- which together with the thin gold chain necklace were the only pieces of jewelry he did not take off for the
GQ photo shoot.
Four gold necklaces. The thin gold chain was identified in
GQ as being from Tiffany and remained tucked under his shirt in all his photos. The rest of the chains may be from Tiffany and/or Yurman.
From late 2016 until June 2018 he did not wear any jewelry.
On May 30, 2018, Judge Ouderkirk signed the Order with the Summer Schedule running from June til August designed to force the children to open up to Brad.
He started wearing a gold necklace after the start of the Summer effort in June, 2018.
He started wearing a bike chain bracelet sporadically starting in October, 2018 while filming OUATIH.
The Judgement on Custody and Visitation was filed in November, 2018.
He started wearing a 2nd gold necklace in December, 2018.
The Judgement on status was filed in April, 2019.
Angelina arrived in Paris on July 7, 2019 and it was announced at a press con for Mon Guerlain Intense that she and Guerlain were working on a bee conservation program in Cambodia. This was also the 1st time she wore a ring on her left hand.
Brad was first seen wearing a large silver Petrvs signet bee ring during OUATIH press promo that started July 11, 2019.
During OUATIH's L.A. premiere on July 22, he was seen wearing a gold Petrvs signet bee ring, 3 necklaces with the addition of Yurman's
Skull Station Necklace in Labradorite, and
at least 3 bracelets --
woven red nylon with black onyx and 8 beads,
small fluted chain bracelet, and another chain.
From his appearance in Mexico on August 12 onward he has worn the same gold Petrvs signet bee ring on his right ring finger. It was also the first time he was seen wearing 6 bracelets which included the red nylon and the bike chain bracelet which he had not worn for several months.
From mid til late August, 2019 he was seen with the same 6 bracelets, 3 necklaces and bee ring
When he appeared in Venice for Ad Astra on August 29, he had 4 necklaces having added a 3rd gold chain. He was still wearing the same 6 bracelets.
Some time before he left for Tokyo on Sept. 11, 2019 he started wearing 7 bracelets with the addition of the
woven army green nylon with black onyx and 8 gold beads.
On Sept. 16, 2019 he was wearing 8 bracelets -- he replaced the green nylon with 2 new: the
Shipwreck Chain and the
Black onyx beads. Four gold chains -- replacing the
Skull Station Necklace in Labradorite with another gold chain. And the same gold Petrvs signet bee ring.
Judging by his jewelry, he made a lot of progress by July, 2019 and made more progress in September.
At the conclusion of his conversation with @AstroHague at the ISS Brad said, "Thank you very much. I can't wait to brag to my kids."
And 4 necklaces.
Brad Pitt has a great laugh: a sort of staccato, slow-rolling ah-huh-huh-huh that makes you think of surfers and cowboys and movie stars. He uses it more than once to excellent effect as Cliff Booth, the laconic stuntman-cum-sidekick who stumbles into the dark heart of the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s showbiz Babylon Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and not at all in the lonely-astronaut epic Ad Astra (out Sept. 20), though it often punctuates his conversation with EW about both those roles.
To say that one of the world’s most beloved and best-known celebrities is having a moment 30-plus years into his career feels, at this point, pretty much indisputable. But don’t call it a comeback, or a Brad-aissance; several times over the course of a friendly, sometimes philosophical interview he’ll insist that his only goal is “putting stories out into the world” — which in 2019 means not just starring in a pair of films that may well end up dominating the coming awards season but also continuing to head up Plan B Entertainment, the boutique production company responsible for a vanguard slate of films, including Vice, Moonlight, Beautiful Boy, and 12 Years a Slave.
That laugh comes tumbling out again when he’s asked to find the thread between Hollywood’s Cliff, a sort of beach-boy Lebowski with a singular gift for sudden violence, and Ad Astra’s Maj. Roy McBride, an almost pathologically contained spaceman on a solo mission to Mars. “Well, Cliff is by far a much easier way to live, and certainly I would say what we’re all striving for,” he says, chuckling. “But to get to Cliff’s peace of mind and acceptance in the day, you’d probably have to go through Roy’s dilemma to get there.”
Pitt quickly grows more serious, though, on the subject of Roy’s arc in
Astra —
an emotional journey that often finds the major struggling to maintain
his NASA-trained composure even as the fate of both his family and the
free world (and, the movie heavily implies, his soul, too) hangs in the
balance. “
Toxic masculinity, that may be a little harsh as a term? But
certainly we’re questioning what is masculinity,” he muses.
“Having grown up in an era where we are taught to be
stoic, taught to be
capable,
not to show weakness, never be disrespected — that works for
the pioneer spirit, I guess, on the plain when you’re trying to make
your claim. But it’s also
very limiting, because it doesn’t embrace the
whole human being.”
And while he admits to having no special affinity for
space movies (“Um no, not specifically. I mean, when I was a kid my dad
took me to see
Alien, and that’s still everything”),
Astra
did get him pondering the mysteries of the universe, as it were: “In
all our concepts and constructs of how we understand life to work, there
are powers there that we cannot even begin to understand,” he marvels.
“Powers that can bend time, and gravitational forces that could crush a
planet. And just that we ourselves are made from dying stars — I find
that really awe-inspiring, just because of how much we don’t know and
yet how connected we are to it.”
Astra director James Gray (
The Lost City of Z),
who has known Pitt for more than two decades, tells EW that though he
didn’t pen the script for his longtime friend — “I never actually write
projects with actors in mind, because you’re always disappointed when
they don’t do it” — he did end up getting exactly the performance he
hoped for: “In some ways, because he’s a star, Brad’s acting is
underrated. To control a performance and still convey the ideas and the
emotions necessary for the film I think is as difficult as anything,
really. To be kind of showy — and by the way I’m not saying this about
him in Quentin’s movie, which I think is wonderful — but sometimes a
showy performance can lead us in a very obvious series of choices. But
he understood it completely, this character who lives so much in his own
head.”
Heady isolation isn’t so much an option in Pitt’s other day job as
the cofounder and CEO of Plan B, which often involves developing and
championing the kinds of films that fall far outside his own lived
experience. “It’s certainly not by design,” he says of the company’s
particular track record with black auteurs like Ava DuVernay and Steve
McQueen. “Myself and my partners Jeremy [Kleiner] and Dede [Gardner]
have an extreme belief in equality and this want for justice in an
unjust world, and I think we naturally are kind of guided that way. We
were trying to get
Selma made for years, and it wasn’t until
12 Years did what it did that it suddenly opened the door for all of these others.”
“Certainly when we started,” he goes on, “it was at a
time when we saw that the studios just weren’t taking that kind of
gamble on more complex mid-range budgeted films. “[And] I’m really proud
of what we’ve been able to contribute to the zeitgeist…. But you know
for every one that gets made, there’s another 10, so it takes a fight
for all of them. And I can’t tell you how many talented, talented people
there are still struggling to to be able to tell their story, the one
that moved them. That’s where we were able to apply our muscle in a way
that I never even expected when we started.”
In fact since its 2001 founding, the company has already racked up three Best Picture wins (for
The Departed,
12 Years a Slave, and
Moonlight). But the thrice-nominated actor promises he’s not interested in gunning for personal gold, despite the growing buzz on
Astra and
Hollywood. “Oh,
man.
I’m gonna abstain,” he says of campaigning for either role (though
his generous recent press schedule may belie that). “I mean, you never
know, and it’s really nice when your number comes up. But the goal is
for the film to land, to speak to someone whether it’s now or a decade
from now.
I find chasing it actually a disservice to the purity of your
telling a story, and a shackling thing to focus on.”
He’s less circumspect when it comes to another, less
expected career avenue: the world of prestige television, where A-list
peers like Nicole Kidman and Matthew McConaughey have already blazed a
trail. “Could I see it? Absolutely,” he says. “What I love about
TV is
that you get to spend more time with the characters. You have to let go
of so many scenes in order to fit into the ‘film’ container, as far as
running time and how it plays, and with a series, being able to break it
up, you can expand so much more. I’m especially drawn to the comedies
that are able to do that. That might just be romantic of me, I may have
to go with the times, so we’ll see. We’ll see where it all lands, but
that’s certainly of interest.”
In the meantime there’s more than enough to keep him occupied,
between promoting his current projects and tending to a production slate
that this year already includes
Astra and the Sundance sensation
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (which EW named the
best film of 2019 so far this past June), as well as the upcoming Timothée Chalamet drama
The King and
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’
Underground Railroad
series for Amazon. So does that mean there could be some truth to a
recent viral magazine quote that implied he’d soon be done with
big-screen acting?
“I was just saying that it’s really a younger man’s
game,” he insists. “Not that there aren’t still parts and interesting
things to do. As I get older and transition does its thing, the great
thing about producing is you still get to be part of what I love most,
which is storytelling. Or maybe it’s just me, maybe I’ve just seen my
interests broadening or shifting into other things. But no. No!” — one
last, long
ah-huh-huh-huh — “It’s not a claim of retirement.”
