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"Pitt's stardom has been sustained not solely on his tabloid coverage but also on a persona sustained by two decades of film roles - a persona that fits more within the literary definition of the (often tragic) figure of the Romantic Hero [or] Byronic Hero" pp. 21f. in Abele, E. (2014) 'Romantic Hero', in Schaberg, C. & Bennett, R. (ed.) Deconstructing Brad Pitt, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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In Ridley Scott's Crime Drama young Brad Pitt plays JD, a hitchhiking heartthrob. This film is also the source of Pitt's famous intimate scene with Geena Davis, which helped form his heroine image.

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Young Brad Pitt innPringles advertisement

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Pitt standing out with his looks in shirtless Pringles commercial

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Young Brad Pitt early in his career Pringles Commercial

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This well reviewed drama, directed by Robert Redford, firstly put Pitt in contact with Academy Award nominations.

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A River Runs Through It (1992) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

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Moss, M. (1992) 'A River Runs Through It', Boxoffice, December 1, pp. 38-39.

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“The persona [...] is separate from the real person and the character roles, but draws form both - “authenticity’’ from the former and “typicality’’ from the latter’’ (1992, p. 33)

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Despite Pitt's personal negative opinion about this role, Neil Jordan's drama earned him a lot of accolades. Once more, the movie featured a much talked about kissing scene.

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Even long after the film's release, the kiss is still topic of conversation

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Even long after the film's release, the kiss is still topic of conversation

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Kirsten Dunst's First Kiss Was Brad Pitt | CONAN on TBS

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According to Northrop Frye , the Romantic Hero "is placed outside the structure of civilisation and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amor or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting" (1968, p. 41)

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Brad Pitt's attempt to lose the fixated image of his usual chivalrous characters with the role of mentally ill Jeffrey Goines landed him an Academy Awards nomination and a Golden Globe, both for the category of Best Supporting Actor.

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This archetype comes off as unsuitable as romantic partner, because they prioritises their personal desires, anxieties, and aspirations over responsibilities, tradition, and family

(Feeley, 2016, p. 55)

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Brad Pitt's film roles in the early 1990s led him to be associated with the archetype of the Romantic Hero

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Brad Pitt's film roles in the early 1990s led him to be associated with the archetype of the Romantic Hero

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Impact of Celebrity Bodies' according to Redmond

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Impact of Celebrity Bodies' according to Redmond

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"One of their key signifying capabilities is communication through the senses, through sensorial representations", effectively heightening the public's focus on their bodies and physique p. 12 in Celebrity & the Media

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Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

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Brad Pitt's Body & Beauty as Element of his Persona

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Brad Pitt's Body & Beauty as Element of his Persona

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Abele points out that, differently to male celebrities coming to fame in the early 1980s, Pitt possesses a leaner physique, consequently reflecting "a more complicated, more personal code of masculinity" (2014, p. 22). Even decades later, Brad Pitt's body is still part of his public persona.

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Brad Pitt With Former Wife & Friends Star Jennifer Aniston

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Brad Pitt With Former Wife & Friends Star Jennifer Aniston

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After a blind date in 1998, the couple took on their first red carpet together in 1999

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The first of multiple collaborations between Pitt and Se7evn's director David Fincher. Pitt portrays a young ambitious detective and loving husband, effectively reuniting himself with the romantic hero. The somber ending, including his wife's death, speaks to Abele's description of a doomed Byronic Hero (2014, p. 21)

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Se7en (1995) Official Trailer - Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman Movie HD

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Picture featured in People Magazine (Dodd, 2023)

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Pitt & Se7en Co-Star Gwyneth Paltrow embark on romantic journey in 1995

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Pitt & Se7en Co-Star Gwyneth Paltrow embark on romantic journey in 1995

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Two years into a reportedly happy relationship, the couple decides to get married. However, six months after announcing their engagement, they break up.

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Pitt's Acceptance Speech For his First Golden Globe

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Pitt's Acceptance Speech For his First Golden Globe

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Beginning his speech with “Oh no!'' expresses the classical sense of humor associated with his charming public persona.

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Brad Pitt Wins Best Supporting Actor Motion Picture - Golden Globes 1996

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Anecdote gives exclusive insight in Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston's seemingly wonderful life as a married couple.

The interview overall presents him as a funny, charming, down to earth guy.

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Brad Pitt on “True Romance” and “Troy” | Late Night with Conan O’Brien

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Pitt standing up for his girlfriend to Harvey Weinstein after Paltrow gets harassed by the producer in 1995

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Pitt standing up for his girlfriend to Harvey Weinstein after Paltrow gets harassed by the producer in 1995

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People Magazine quote Paltrow about her boyfriend confronting Weinstein: "It was so fantastic ... He leveraged his fame and power to protect me at a time when I didn't have fame or power yet." (Dodd, 2023)

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“blue eyed charisma'' as journalist Dunn calls it in Rollings Stone magazine (1997)

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“blue eyed charisma'' as journalist Dunn calls it in Rollings Stone magazine (1997)

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“Pitt is low-key, free of attitude and positive''

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“Pitt is low-key, free of attitude and positive''

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When having a conversation with Brad Pitt, journalists often describe to feel “instantly at ease'' and to “forget he's a huge movie star'' (Dunn, 1997, Rolling Stone)

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Taking on his usual on-screen romantic hero character in real life, aligns Pitt's private and public spheres with each other. The “collection of images'' (McDonald, 2000, p. 6) standing in for Pitt's authentic self seem to create a cohesive picture with this information revealed.

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Pitt about his films Meet Joe Black (1998) & Fight Club (1999)

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Pitt about his films Meet Joe Black (1998) & Fight Club (1999)

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Despite being part of Hollywood's elite at this point, Pitt speaks humbly about admiring co-stars, such as Anthony Hopkins, and feeling overwhelmed at the beginning of shoots.

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#TBT: Brad Pitt On ‘Fight Club’, ‘Meet Joe Black’ | TODAY

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Screenshot of Fight Club, feature in The Hollywood Reporter article

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With his role as Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt steps further away from his classic archetype as Byronic Hero. McGavin describes Pitt's character as “the catalyst for the Narrator’s violent rejection of the bourgeois life'' (2019, The Hollywood Reporter)

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Brad Pitt remains one of two celebrities to have been named “Sexiest Man Alive'' by People Magazine twice.

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Fight Club co-star Helena Bonham Carter about Brad Pitt:

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Fight Club co-star Helena Bonham Carter about Brad Pitt:

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“What makes him really attractive is internal – his humor and caring and curiosity", as quoted in People Magazine in 2004.

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An unusually public engagement announcement

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An unusually public engagement announcement

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Instead of publishing an article, the couple opted for presenting their plan to marry personally and publicly at a Sting concert. A little sliver of truthfulness, and therefore arguably authenticity, is revealed with this.

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Despite a public engagement announcement, the wedding was kept secretive. Wedding G magazine even claims that even the airspace above the wedding premises was restricted.

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Gledhill describes the actor as “the site of amorous and shifting bodily attributes, instinct, psychic drives and experiences’’ (1991, pp. 214f.); a versatility perfectly visible in Brad Pitt's Jeffrey Goines.

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“a star persona is as much a constructed character as any film role’’ (Shingler, 2012, p. 126)

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“Pitt’s personal life [has] reflected the simpler definition of a romantic star, as he has moved serially between intense, monogamous relationships with beautiful actresses’’ (Abele, 2014, p. 21)

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Brad Pitt on His First Kiss, What He Wore to Prom, and His Early Days as an Extra | W Magazine

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) - the Start of Brangelina

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) - the Start of Brangelina

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith: A Classic Couple's Halloween Costume

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith: A Classic Couple's Halloween Costume

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Especially among younger generations and on social media, this couple's costume has become a very popular option for Halloween.

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@taylormaeredfern
Our best costume yet 🩸✨🫶🏼🍂 #halloweencostume #halloween #couplescostume #coupleshalloweencostumes #mrandmrssmith #mrandmrssmithcostume #halloweentok #halloweentiktok
♬ Drake of the Fates - Kyberphonic

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Brangelina's Divorce now titled "War of the Rose"

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Brangelina's Divorce now titled "War of the Rose"

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Peace talks: could mediation put an end to Brangelina’s messy vineyard dispute?

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From Jolie’s lawyers calling Pitt a “petulant child” to reported ‘peace talks’ nearly seven years after they filed

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In this recent interview, one can see a shift from the young, heartthrob actor giddily talking about his films (like in the TODAY interview from 1998), to a more mature, relaxed mentor personality. A significant change is how a grown up Pitt clearly prefers to talk about other people's success, in this case Adam Sandler's, than his own fame and films.

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Brad Pitt & Adam Sandler - Actors on Actors - Full Conversation

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Brad Pitt as Will Colbert in Friends Season 8, Ep. 9

Funnily enough, Pitt's character hates Rachel (played by Aniston).

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“This for my kids, who color everything I do. I adore you!'' 

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“This for my kids, who color everything I do. I adore you!'' 

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Brad Pitt thanks his kids in his Oscar acceptance speech for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in 2020.

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former Hollywood's It couple is still much talked about in social media now

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former Hollywood's It couple is still much talked about in social media now

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@anistonpitt
#jenniferaniston #bradpitt #foryoupage #fyp
♬ Only Love Can Hurt Like This (Slowed Down Version) - Paloma Faith

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Pitt as proud father when asked about his daughter, Zahara, deciding to go to college.

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Brad Pitt Reacts to His Daughter’s College Decision #Shorts

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#BradPitt #AngelinaJolie #BulletTrain #PEOPLESubscribe to People ►► http://bit.ly/SubscribetoPeople Catch up on the latest celebrity news, top stories and mo…

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Interviews like these depict perfectly what Turner describes as a constant back and forth of the fans needing access to a celebrity's life and a celebrity needing the fan's interest for keeping their status (2007, p. 38)

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Screenshot of W Magazine article published in 2005

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“Domestic Bliss: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at Home'' by W Magazine

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“Domestic Bliss: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at Home'' by W Magazine

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This article shows the ambiguity gossip publications try to achieve. Stories should be a commodity and paint stars as “spectacular and exorbiant’’, while at the same time help “[construct] the celebrities' everydayness - their similarity to us’’ (Turner, 2007, p. 44)

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"The Power of Brad and Angelina's Co-Brand"

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"The Power of Brad and Angelina's Co-Brand"

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In the context of 2010's falsely rumored split of the Hollywood It couple, Fast Company magazine writes about Brangelina's function as co-brand and compares it Nike & Apple, as well as Aston Martin & Nokia partnerships

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

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In addition to receiving multiple Academy Awards nominations and wins, Pitt's character in this film reflected his star persona after becoming a father, even if so in a wildly different context. Moreover, it once again connected the actor to the Romantic archetype previously explained.

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Differently to many other role, Pitt plays an eccentric fitness trainer finding himself in various comical situations throughout the movie.

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Brad Pitt's character Billy Beane, Oakland Athletics manager, "riffs on the nature of crashing" (Schaberg, 2014, p. 42)

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For his role, Cliff Booth, Pitt won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

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Taking step away from usual Romantic Hero characters

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Taking step away from usual Romantic Hero characters

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Both in Fight Club (1999) and Burn After Reading (2008), as well as in Moneyabll (2011), Pitt strays away from his established hero characterisation. This is especially visible in Fight Club, as his entire part is based on breaking down the Narrator's stability in life.

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Living a more private life after divorce 

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Living a more private life after divorce 

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Split in 2016 but pronounced legally single in April 2019

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Split in 2016 but pronounced legally single in April 2019

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"He’s trying to think carefully about what’s ahead, about the path that he wants to chart for the final stages of an abundantly creative career". A big part of that is working as a film producer behind the camera rather than acting in front of it.

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We know him as a legendary leading man, a Hollywood power broker, maybe the greatest heartthrob of all time. But Brad Pitt isn't attached to any of those old conceptions. And, as Ottessa Moshfegh discovers, his ambitions for the rest of his life are more mystical than we ever could have imagined

Brad Pitt tries to remember his dreams. He keeps pen and paper on his bedside table and records everything he can recall when he wakes up in the morning. "I've found that to be really helpful," he says. "I'm curious what's going on in there when I'm not at the helm." He tells me this one recent afternoon in the brightness of his living room, at his Craftsman home in the Hollywood Hills. For a long while, his sleep had been haunted by a particularly persistent and violent dream-the particulars of which he later describes for me in an email exchange. He writes:
For a solid four or five years there, the most predominant dream I would experience would be getting jumped and stabbed. It would always be at night, in the dark, and I would be walking down a sidewalk in a park or along a boardwalk and as I'd pass under an Exorcist-like street lamp, someone would jump out of the abyss and stab me in the ribs. Or I'd notice I was being followed and then another flanked me and I realised I was trapped, and they meant me grave harm. Or being chased through a house with a kid I'd help escape but got pinned in on the deck-and stabbed. Always stabbed. And I would awake in a terror. I didn't understand why it/they would want to hurt me. This stopped a year or two ago only when I started going straight back into the dream and asking simply why?
One might be tempted to psychoanalyse a dream like that. Brad Pitt-the golden boy from Missouri who moved to California on a lark at 22 and became the biggest movie star in the world, who reportedly makes up to $20 million [£16 million] a film, who was twice part of perhaps the most famous relationship on the planet-cannot go anywhere without being stalked by the paparazzi. It's easy to see how this man might feel hunted and haunted. What's perhaps surprising is how the bad dream eventually went away: Only by studying this nightmare-by taking careful note of it and trying to pin down its meaning-did it begin to have less of a hold on him.

He's 58 now, nearly six years on from a difficult divorce from Angelina Jolie, with whom he has six children. We see less of him than we once did. Having receded from his position as a perennial leading man, he appears onscreen a bit more sporadically these days, playing characters who feel increasingly unexpected and playfully subvert our assumptions of the kind of movie star that he's been for 30 years. He focuses a good deal of his attention on his role as a film producer, through which he's happily supporting rising auteurs and helping to shepherd the work of great authors to the screen. When we meet, he seems to me more ruminative, more intentional, more of an artist than I perhaps expected. He tells me he's trying to think carefully about what's ahead, about the path that he wants to chart for the final stages of an abundantly creative career. "I consider myself on my last leg," he says to me, "this last semester or trimester. What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?"

Mining his dreams for what meaning they might contain, he says, is a part of that process. As is plumbing his own past for the wisdom that comes from his challenges. "Out here in California," he says, "there's a lot of talk about 'being your authentic self.' It would plague me, what does 'authentic' mean? [For me] it was getting to a place of acknowledging those deep scars that we carry."

Pitt has a number of properties in and outside of L.A.-a beach house near Santa Barbara, a modernist glass-and-steel residence also in the Hollywood Hills-but it's this Craftsman home, which has been a fixture in his life throughout his tenure as a movie star, where he's been holed up for much of the pandemic. Inside, the walls are a caramel shade of cedar, and the ground floor rooms are appointed with vintage furniture and tasteful art. There are no obvious family photos on display, and no flourishes of luxury to the place, apart from the simple fineness of the home, perfect in its adherence to its early-20th-century aesthetic.

When he welcomes me in, Pitt is wearing neutral tones, draped khaki trousers and a loose white T-shirt, like a man trying to camouflage himself in a wheat field. The colours call to mind the Midwest, big skies. Pitt grew up in the Ozarks, a place he speaks about with reverie. A scented candle perfumes the kitchen where he cheerfully offers me a beverage: tea, coffee, water, juice, booze. I'm sober, like Pitt, who hasn't had a drink in almost six years. I take water, as does he.

"Cold or room temp?" he asks.

I choose cold because I want to see into his fridge: barely anything in there, just the cool bluish glare of the electric light. "All my friends have gone to room temp," he says. Room temp. That seems appropriate. The vibe here is gentle and calm.

"Is there anyone else in this house?" I ask him.

"Nah," he says quickly. He has a friendly but acerbic way of answering the yes-or-no questions that, I assume, he might prefer that I not pursue. Nope. Yep.

In the fireplace, there's a barely smouldering log, and Pitt pulls up a chair as though to bask in its warmth. His eyes are clear and pale blue and they catch the light as he turns to me.

"This was the first place I bought when I made some money in '94," he says. Pitt purchased the property from Cassandra Peterson, best known for her roles on TV and in film as the campy horror host Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She's told stories of the house being haunted when she lived here, claiming that she once heard the sound of footsteps coming from the uninhabited third floor, saw the ghost of a nurse, and of a man in period clothing sitting near the fireplace. She also claims Mark Hamill told her he lived in the house in the 1960s until his roommate hanged himself in a bedroom closet. "It was really run-down and dilapidated," Pitt tells me of his arrival. "I lived here for a few years, then I bounced around everywhere, just let friends crash here, and then somewhere in the aughts I fixed it up. Been pretty much hiding out here."

Lately, he's been rising early to play his guitar, a pursuit he took up toward the beginning of the pandemic. He'll come down to the living room, where he'll light a fire and strum a bit. He feels at ease here, he says, but is also happy to get out of town, often taking drives up the coast to his beach house-a trip just long enough to seem like an escape. "I drive out and I just feel like I'm taking off a cloak or something," he says. When he's heading back into town, he says he can feel the weight of the place. "As soon as you turn in past Santa Barbara, I feel it coming. The shoulders start getting a little higher, and I feel it. I'm not quite sure what that is and how to contend with it just yet. Other than getting out and traveling a lot."

Of course, it's work that often keeps him anchored to L.A., and his friends tell me that he's happiest when he's got his head down in a project. One close confidant, Flea, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' bassist, explains, "When Brad's lost in the process of creating, there's something magical about that. It's like this thing that lights something inside a human being that gives them power and opens them up."

"He's one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars. It's just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don't think you can describe exactly what that is because it's like describing starshine."

Indeed, the work Pitt is doing today is gratifying in new and different ways. This year, Plan B Entertainment, his production company, is putting out Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews's novel about a group of Mennonite women who unite against their rapists, directed by Sarah Polley. "It's as profound a film as anything made this decade," Pitt tells me. And there's also the forthcoming film version of Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe's interior life, directed by Andrew Dominik. Add those to a slate of other acclaimed novels Plan B has adapted or optioned-Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -and a portrait emerges of Pitt as a kind of literary kingmaker.

And yet, for all his high-mindedness as a producer and his increasing selectivity as an actor, Pitt is glad to lend his talents to the odd blockbuster when the timing is right, especially when there's a personal connection. That includes this summer's Bullet Train, directed by David Leitch, whose relationship with Pitt goes back to 1999's Fight Club, when Leitch served as the star's stunt double, a role Leitch would reprise in a number of films, including Troy and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Their filmmaking relationship took on a remarkable new vector when the pair began talking about Bullet Train, yet Leitch says their collaboration was as natural as ever. "In the conversations I had with Brad," he says, "the number one goal was to make a movie that's entertaining and escapist and fresh and original, that will make people want to come back to the theatre."

Bullet Train may be a feel-good summer blockbuster, but it was filmed in part on a soundstage in L.A. in the middle of the pandemic. "It was heavy outside those studio gates," costar Brian Tyree Henry recalls. "What I remember mostly is the laughter. Brad's laugh is really infectious. He brings this kind of ease to set where there's nothing overworked. You're sitting across from a master class of cool."

"I'm one of those creatures that speaks through art. I just want to always make. If I'm not making, I'm dying in some way."

In the film, Pitt plays Ladybug, an assassin on a train from Tokyo to Kyoto who's just recovered from a case of burnout, returning to his high-stakes job with a somewhat misguided sense of confidence about his fitness for duty. "You know, you do a month of therapy," Pitt says about his character, "you have one epiphany, and you think you've got it all figured out, and you're never going to be forlorn ever again. That was that. I got this, I'm good to go! "

The character is a familiar type for Pitt-likable, flawed, a little eccentric-and he plays the part with an easy charm and self-effacing humour that evokes some of his other recent roles, like Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. To Quentin Tarantino, who directed Pitt in that role, as well as in Inglourious Basterds, Pitt's shape-shifting as an actor is evidence of a kind of screen presence we just don't see much anymore. "He suggests an older-style movie star," Tarantino tells me over the phone. "He's really good-looking. He's also really masculine and he's also really hip; he gets the joke.... But the thing that only the directors that work with Brad and the actors that act opposite him really know, what he's so incredibly talented at, is his ability to really understand the scene. He might not be able to articulate it, but he has an instinctive understanding about it."

What Pitt exudes, Tarantino says, is a rare timelessness. "He's one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars," the director tells me, equating his star quality with that of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Steve McQueen. "It's just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don't think you can describe exactly what that is because it's like describing starshine. I noticed it when we were doing Inglourious Basterds. When Brad was in the shot, I didn't feel like I was looking through the viewfinder of the camera. I felt like I was watching a movie. Just his presence in the four walls of the frame created that impression."

His Hollywood origin story is famous: He arrived in town in his Datsun, having left the University of Missouri two credits short of his degree. He'd been studying journalism, hoping to one day become an art director, and though those vague aspirations quickly faded, certain proclivities remained. He's always loved to make things, hold things, feel their quality and texture. It's a passion he first developed in his junior high shop class, and, he tells me, one that defines him still.

"I'm one of those creatures that speaks through art," Pitt explains. "I just want to always make. If I'm not making, I'm dying in some way." Of course, Pitt has also made more than merely movies: sculpture, furniture, homes. As his friend Spike Jonze, the filmmaker, recalls, sometimes Pitt makes music too: "The other day he came over obsessing over the song 'Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)' that Arcade Fire released two days earlier, and we sat and listened to it and played guitar and sang along to it a dozen times just to get to experience it inside out. I could feel the song spilling out of him."

As we're talking in his living room, Pitt slips away for a moment and then reappears, looming over the couch on which I sit. He slaps two incredibly heavy candlesticks into my open palms. I understand that these are his creations. Over the pandemic, he learned ceramics. The candlesticks are painted black and gold and are very handsome. "That's porcelain," he says. "Everything I read, porcelain's about being thin so that light penetrates, the thinner you get. It's a cardinal sin to make it thick." And yet that's what Pitt has done, and he's succeeded. "What I love is the heft, like a Leica camera or a quality watch. You could dump this in the dirt and someone could dig it up 2,000 years later, because it's been under a volcanic reaction."

Perhaps the most renowned of Pitt's creative sidelines is the wine that he's been producing at his estate in Provence, Château Miraval. In 2008, he and Jolie bought the thousand--acre property, which produces a world-class rosé that has become a multimillion--dollar business; in 2014 the two were married there. More recently, the estate popped up in the press when Jolie sold her stake in the business. Before the legal wrangling that has since ensued, Pitt received an interesting bit of information about the property.

He tells me that he was approached a few years ago by a man who explained to him that the château was supposedly home to another fortune: millions of dollars' worth of gold that one of the estate's medieval owners had taken from the Levant during the Crusades and buried on the grounds. "I got obsessed," Pitt says. "Like for a year, this was all I could think about, just the excitement of it all." He bought radar equipment and scoured his property. "Maybe it has something to do with where I grew up, because in the Ozark Mountains there were always stories of hidden caches of gold."

Of course, no treasure was unearthed. Pitt says the man who'd approached him was ultimately seeking money for some kind of radar company; an investment opportunity, he was told. The whole thing went nowhere and Pitt was left feeling a little surprised that he'd let himself believe in the idea. The entire experience was, he says, "pretty foolish in the end. It was just the hunt that was exciting."

As he finishes this story, Pitt offers me a nicotine mint. He chews them mindlessly. He explains that he quit smoking during the pandemic after realising that simply cutting back on cigarettes wasn't going to suffice-he had to cut them out. "I don't have that ability to do just one or two a day," he says. "It's not in my makeup. I'm all in. And I'm going to drive into the ground. I've lost my privileges."

It's one of several radical changes he's made to his health over the past few years. After Jolie filed for divorce, in 2016, he got sober and spent a year and a half attending Alcoholics Anonymous. "I had a really cool men's group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe," he says. "Because I'd seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that's just atrocious to me."

When Pitt talks about the past, he's got a Buddhist style of detachment, a calm kind of self-inquiry. He's also very willing to admit the appeal of his old vices, thinking back to the days when he'd have a cigarette "in the morning, with the coffee-just delicious." In Pitt's mind there are certain people who can do that all their life and get away with it. Indestructible types like David Hockney, the British painter. Pitt has met him on a couple of occasions. "He's still chaining, the hard-core English way. It looks great." Pitt smiles ruefully. "I don't think I have that. I'm just at that age when nothing good comes from it."

Pitt has talked in the past about a curious problem he has in social settings, especially at parties. He struggles to remember new people, to recognise their faces, and he fears it's led to a certain impression of him: that he's remote and aloof, inaccessible, self-absorbed. But the truth is, he wants to remember the people he meets and he's ashamed that he can't. He's never been officially diagnosed but thinks he may suffer from a specific condition: prosopagnosia, an inability to recognise people's faces that's otherwise known as face blindness.

When I tell him that my husband seems to suffer from this as well, Pitt goes wild. "Nobody believes me!" he cries. "I wanna meet another." He's making uncannily good eye contact as he says this, and it's at this point that I realise that Brad Pitt is definitely not aloof or reserved. The truth is, sitting with him is an altogether different experience. He's affable and charming in all the ways you might hope, but his charisma goes deeper: This is a man who seems deeply committed to forging meaningful connections, to probing life's existential quandaries and hearing your personal stories. He's the opposite of a guy who'd snub you at a party. He's the guy who wants to see your soul.

He's also a guy who, hidden under his shirt, has a line from a Rumi poem inked across his right bicep: "There exists a field, beyond all notions of right and wrong. I will meet you there." It's a deeply romantic idea, but does it also hint at a certain solitude? "I always felt very alone in my life," he explains, "alone growing up as a kid, alone even out here, and it's really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family. What's that line, it was either Rilke or Einstein, believe it or not, but it was something about when you can walk with the paradox, when you carry real pain and real joy simultaneously, this is maturity, this is growth."

Then he turns his lens on me. "I wanted to ask you," he says, "why the fuck are we here? What's beyond? Because I gather that you believe in something beyond.... Do you feel trapped here, in this body and in this environment?"

In response, I recite another Rumi poem: "I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.... I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home."

Insane to think I am quoting a 13th-century Persian poet to a movie star in L.A. in 2022, but I think it goes over well. I tell him that my so-called aviary isn't too bad; I'm lucky. "But while I'm here on earth," I say, "I'm a bit hypersensitive to things. Like music."

"What is that about?" Pitt asks. "Because music fills me with so much joy. I think joy's been a newer discovery, later in life. I was always moving with the currents, drifting in a way, and onto the next. I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it's not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self-the beauty and the ugly-that I've been able to catch those moments of joy."

"My heart just might be broken," I tell him. "So when I feel things, when my heart is activated, it hurts."

"I think all our hearts are broken," he says. There's a bit of dad in his voice. It sounds like sincere care and wisdom, as if I'm talking to a guy on a long-distance train ride who is curious and kind and has all the time in the world to let me try to say what I mean.

He's always on a quest for meaning, he tells me. By way of explanation, he brings up a poem by Rilke. "He's describing this bust of Apollo, and he's talking about the craftsmanship, and then suddenly out of nowhere is this line, 'You must change your life.' You know it? Oh, it gives me chills."

Pitt polishes off his bottle of water and looks past me, seemingly lost in thought. Silence is especially dramatic when Brad Pitt is creating it.

Suddenly, he's scrolling through photos on his iPhone. The bust of Apollo made him think about the L.A.-based artist Charles Ray, perhaps the most influential sculptor working today and, it turns out, a mutual acquaintance of ours. Pitt tells me he recently saw an exhibition of Ray's work at the Pinault Collection in Paris. "He made this Christ out of paper," Pitt says, showing me a photo on his phone. "And the way the light catches it is something unbelievable. Also, it's not on the wall and it's not on the cross, although he's crucified. He's floating, it's like he's free of it, it's just so stunning. See how it floats, and the shadow on the wall?"

The paper Christ that Pitt is talking about is a study after 17th-century Italian sculptor Alessandro Algardi's Corpus Christi, which was originally cast in silver for Pope Innocent X. Ray created the Christ form by moulding wet paper pulp, and considers the piece to be a kind of drawing rather than a sculpture. Pitt zooms in on details to show me the beauty of the work. "See the way the light bounces off it? It's still got the movement of the wind, and the nail holes are there. Just beautiful..."

Later, Ray explains to me his ambitions for the sculpture: "I thought that if I extended the structure of what paper could actually do and push its material structure and scale to a limit where it could barely hold together, then I might find divinity in my endeavour." Like Ray, Pitt seems interested in finding something sacred in the making of things. But he hesitates to call himself an artist. His personal pursuit of ceramics isn't an art form, he tells me, but a "solo, very quiet, very tactile kind of sport." I think this is his Ozarkian humility coming through. He's obviously an artist-he lives like one, works like one, ruminates like one, suffers and aspires like one-and thinks deeply about what it means to be one. "Art is something inexplicable," he says. "Art is something that gives you goose bumps, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, that brings a tear to the eye. Maybe it's because someone understood before you, you're not alone."

A few days after we meet at his house, Pitt sends me an email-composed, he tells me, just after a six-hour oral surgery-in which he elaborates on the answers he gave in our interview. The email is broken down into three categories: Summation, Clarification, Rumination. And he explains, as if to a friend, something he has learned about effective communication in a relationship, emphasising that a healthy self begins with taking "radical accountability."

Is Brad Pitt psychic, I wonder, or is it obvious that I need advice in this area? Earlier in the day, my husband confronted me about this very issue of accountability, claiming that I deflect critical feedback as though I'm made of glass. I'm afraid to see myself clearly sometimes, it's true. Then I remember Pitt's comforting half-smile. "All our hearts are broken," he said.

I also think back to Pitt's dreams about stalkers coming out of the darkness to stab him, and about how he learned to control those dreams by simply asking "Why?" That inquisitive side of him has come into clearer focus now, his need to excavate life's most complex truths. I write back, asking what he interprets these dreams to mean. A few days later, he offers this explanation:
My interpretation of the stabbing dreams were on the surface about fears, feeling unsafe, completely alone-but beneath it all they mostly seemed to be about buried needs-those aspects of self that weren't allowed to bloom as a child-like healthy anger, individuality, or especially a voice.
It takes courage to foray back into a nightmare and unearth the pains of one's childhood, and to name them. And it takes skill to simultaneously stand in the place of both your ghost and your killer in order to play out the drama between them. There's something useful in Pitt's example here-his ability to be two things at once, his willingness to carry the paradox of being human.

When Pitt and I were sitting together by the fire, he said something profound: "I am a murderer. I'm a lover. I have the capacity for great empathy and I can devolve into pettiness." One might say that in dreams we can be anyone, feel anything, go anywhere. We are like actors in a movie of our own making, and we watch the film alone at night, in the dark. If we truly want to understand ourselves, we ought to take notes.

Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of six books of fiction, including the novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Lapvona, which was published in June.
A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2022 issue with the title "Brad Pitt's Wildest Dreams"
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Elizaveta Porodina
Styled by Jon Tietz
Hair by Josh Marquette
Makeup by Stacey Panepinto
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Heath Mattioli for Frank Reps
Produced by Michael Klein at Circadian Pictures
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We know him as a legendary leading man, a Hollywood power broker, maybe the greatest heartthrob of all time. But Brad Pitt isn't attached to any of those old conceptions.

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As Shingler describes it: “the star is incarnated in the characters of his or her films but also transcends them’’ 2012, p. 122

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Extract from NYT magazine, "Angelina Jolie Details Abuse Allegations Against Brad Pitt in Countersuit"

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Pitt allegedly abusing former wife and kids

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Pitt allegedly abusing former wife and kids

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Jolie fights Pitt's lawsuit with a cross complaint. The described incident supposedly is what caused Jolie to file for divorce shortly after.

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Jolie sells her share for together bought winery in 2021 

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Jolie sells her share for together bought winery in 2021 

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According to Pitt, his former wife sold their shared Château Miraval winery illegally and vindictively. As this headline shows, press leans toward siding with Brad Pitt in this lawsuit.

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Brad Pitt goes off on Angelina Jolie’s ‘vindictive’ winery sale. And she fires back

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Brad Pitt is accusing Angelina Jolie of ‘secretly’ selling her share of their Chateau Miraval winery ‘to seize profits.’ But she cites alleged abuse.

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"This decision is the result of much thoughtful consideration. We happily remain committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another." The couple gets divorced shortly after rumors about Brangelina appear in the media.

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Jennifer Aniston made a rare statement about moving on after divorcing Brad Pitt

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Therapy wasn’t the only thing that helped.

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"Born like a phoenix from the ashes of Brad and Jennifer Aniston’s world-rocking break up"

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"Born like a phoenix from the ashes of Brad and Jennifer Aniston’s world-rocking break up"

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The Standard Magazine, Edmonds & Mussen, 2023

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"We know him as a legendary leading man, a Hollywood power broker, maybe the greatest heartthrob of all time. But Brad Pitt isn’t attached to any of those old conceptions. [...] His ambitions for the rest of his life are more mystical than we ever could have imagined"

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"We know him as a legendary leading man, a Hollywood power broker, maybe the greatest heartthrob of all time. But Brad Pitt isn’t attached to any of those old conceptions. [...] His ambitions for the rest of his life are more mystical than we ever could have imagined"

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Unlike other celebrities, Pitt did not want to get paid for this small role, the only thing he asked for in return was a single cup of coffee.

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Pitt named in Elle Magazine's "30 Sober Celebrities" in October 2023

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Pitt named in Elle Magazine's "30 Sober Celebrities" in October 2023

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With this dramatic role, Brad Pitt focusses on creative expression of his character, Rob McBride.

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Spending time in a friend's sculpting studio 

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Spending time in a friend's sculpting studio 

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While taking a step back from public appearances and shooting films, Pitt has nurtured his inner creative side

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Pitt on identifying with his character Cliff Booth

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Pitt on identifying with his character Cliff Booth

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"A guy who was pretty at peace with his place in life. Knew what he was dedicated to do, what he was not dedicated to do; looked for the best in people, but was not surprised to get the worst in people... I could relate to that" he said in a W Magazine in 2020.

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With age, Pitt remains charming, but, without losing passion for films and arts, has become more relaxed in life.

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With age, Pitt remains charming, but, without losing passion for films and arts, has become more relaxed in life.

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Pitt states he enjoys doing less press nowadays with streaming services existing, than before they were as big a part of the entertainment industry as now.

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Pitt states he enjoys doing less press nowadays with streaming services existing, than before they were as big a part of the entertainment industry as now.

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Golden Boy image has become fixated enough at this point in Pitt's career, that accusations weren't as much a scandal as they might have been for someone with a less established image

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Golden Boy image has become fixated enough at this point in Pitt's career, that accusations weren't as much a scandal as they might have been for someone with a less established image

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Angelina Jolie & Jennifer Aniston were portrayed worse in media and press in the years of divorce than Brad Pitt.

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Angelina Jolie & Jennifer Aniston were portrayed worse in media and press in the years of divorce than Brad Pitt.

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"And yet the enterprise known as Brad Pitt inexorably carries on" 

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"And yet the enterprise known as Brad Pitt inexorably carries on" 

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Pitt's alcoholism and other addictions are depicted as a challenge he had to face to become a better version of himself, rather than a career-shattering scandal.

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Summer is coming and, in America, that means it's time to hit the national parks. So we took Brad Pitt and photographer Ryan McGinley tumbling across three of them: The Everglades, White Sands, and Carlsbad Caverns. Then we sat down with Pitt at home in L.A. for a raw conversation about how to move forward after things fall apart.

Brad Pitt is making matcha green tea on a cool morning in his old Craftsman in the Hollywood Hills, where he's lived since 1994. There have been other properties in other places-including a château in France and homes in New Orleans and New York City-but this has always been his kids' "childhood home," he says. And even though they're not here now, he's decided it's important that he is. Today the place is deeply silent, except for the snoring of his bulldog, Jacques.

Pitt wears a flannel shirt and skinny jeans that hang loose on his frame. Invisible to the eye is that sculpted bulk we've seen on film for a quarter-century. He looks like an L.A. dad on a juice cleanse, gearing up to do house projects. On the counter sit some plated goodies from Starbucks, which he doesn't touch, and some coffee, which he does. Pitt, who exudes likability, general decency, and a sense of humor (dark and a little cockeyed), says he's really gotten into making matcha lately, something a friend introduced him to. He loves the whole ritual of it. He deliberately sprinkles some green powder in a cup with a sifter, then pours in the boiling water, whisking with a bamboo brush, until the liquid is a harlequin froth. "You're gonna love this," he says, handing me the cup.

Serenity, balance, order: That's the vibe, at least. That's what you think you're feeling in the kitchen of Brad Pitt's perfectly constructed, awesomely decorated abode. Outside, children's bikes are lined up in the rack; a blown-up dragon floatie bobs on the pool through the window. From the sideboard, with its exquisite inlay, to the vase on the mantel, the house exudes care and intention. And it carries its own stories, not just about when the Jolie-Pitts were a happy family, but also from back in the day, when Jimi Hendrix crashed here. It's said he wrote "May This Be Love" out in the grotto, with its waterfall (Waterfall / Nothing can harm me at all...). "I don't know if it's true," says Pitt, "but a hippie came by and said he used to drop acid with Jim back there, so I run with the story."

And yet Pitt is the first one to acknowledge that it's been chaos these past six months, during what he calls a "weird" time. In conversation, he seems absolutely locked in one moment and a little twitchy and forlorn in the next, having been put on a journey he didn't intend to make but admits was "self-inflicted." The unfortunate worst of it surfaced in public this past September. When he was on a flight to Los Angeles aboard a private plane, there was a reported altercation between Pitt and one of his six children, 15-year-old Maddox. An anonymous phone call was made to the authorities, which triggered an FBI investigation (ultimately closed with no charges). Five days later, his wife, Angelina Jolie, filed for divorce. By then, everything in Pitt's world was in free fall. It wasn't just a public-relations crisis-there was a father suddenly deprived of his kids, a husband without wife. And 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.

And yet the enterprise known as Brad Pitt inexorably carries on. In November, the movie Allied came out, starring Pitt and Marion Cotillard. At the premiere he was described as "gaunt," and rumors of an affair with Cotillard, and an on-set encounter between her and Jolie, had been so virulent that Cotillard took to social media to deny them, underscoring her love for her own partner, with whom she was pregnant with their second child. Meanwhile, Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment, found itself winning an astonishing third Oscar for Best Picture, with Moonlight. (Pitt spent the Oscars ceremony at a friend's house.) This month Netflix will release Pitt's War Machine, a satire based on the incidents surrounding the firing of General Stanley McChrystal. In the film, he plays a gruff, ascetic stand-in for McChrystal, General Glen McMahon, with both big-gestured comic panache and an oblivious unknowingness that seems to be a metaphor for the entire American war effort.

But on this overcast spring morning, catching Pitt at this flexion point, I would say he seems more like one of those stripped-down Samuel Beckett characters, in a blank landscape, asking big questions of a futile world. Even the generalities he employs for protection seem metaphoric. (He mentioned his estranged wife's name only once, when referencing her Cambodia movie, First They Killed My Father, telling me, "You should see Angie's film.") The loneliness of this new life, he said, is mitigated by Jacques, who spent most of the interview beached in a narcoleptic reverie at my feet, snoring and farting. ("Did you ever have the uncle that came over with emphysema, and had to sleep in your room when you were 6?" he says. "That's Jacques." And then: "Come here, boy. Friends for life!")

When I ask Pitt what gives him the most comfort these days, he says, "I get up every morning and I make a fire. When I go to bed, I make a fire, just because-it makes me feel life. I just feel life in this house."

GQ Style: Let's go back to the start. What was it like growing up where you grew up?
Brad Pitt: Well, it was Springfield, Missouri, which is a big place now, but we grew up surrounded by cornfields-which is weird because we always had canned vegetables. I never could figure that one out! Anyway, ten minutes outside of town, you start getting into forests and rivers and the Ozark Mountains. Stunning country.

Did you have a Huck Finn boyhood?
Half the time. Half the time, yeah.

How so?
I grew up in caves. We had a lot of caves, fantastic caverns. And we grew up First Baptist, which is the cleaner, stricter, by-the-book Christianity. Then, when I was in high school, my folks jumped to a more charismatic movement, which got into speaking in tongues and raising your hands and some goofy-ass shit.

So were you there for speaking in tongues?
Yeah, come on. I'm not even an actor yet, but I know... I mean the people, I know they believe it. I know they're releasing something. God, we're complicated. We're complicated creatures.

So acting came out of what you saw in these revival meetings?
Well, people act out. But as a kid, I was certainly drawn to stories-beyond the stories that we were living and knew, stories with different points of view. And I found those stories in film, especially. Different cultures and lives so foreign to mine. I think that was one of the draws that propelled me into film. I didn't know how to articulate stories. I'm certainly not a good orator, sitting here telling a story, but I could foster them in film.

I remember going to a few concerts, even though we were told rock shows are the Devil, basically. Our parents let us go, they weren't neo about it. But I realized that the reverie and the joy and exuberance, even the aggression, I was feeling at the rock show was the same thing at the revival. One is Jimmy Swaggart and one is Jerry Lee Lewis, you know? One's God and one's Devil. But it's the same thing. It felt like we were being manipulated. What was clear to me was "You don't know what you're talking about-"

And it didn't fuck you up?
No, it didn't fuck me up-it just led to some eating questions at a young age.

But then, in War Machine, you find the little gesture that makes the Glen McMahon character ours. Like the way he runs, which is hilarious.
The run to me was important because it was about the delusion of your own grandeur, not knowing what you really look like. All pencil legs, you know. Not being able to connect reality to this facade of grandeur.

Have you ever felt the need to be more political?
I can help in other ways. I can help by getting movies out with certain messages. I've got to be moved by something-I can't fake it. I grew up with that Ozarkian mistrust of politics to begin with, so I just do better building a house for someone in New Orleans or getting certain movies to the screen that might not get made otherwise.

You're good at playing that kind of character, the one that doesn't have a truly accurate vision of himself.
It makes me laugh. Any of my foibles are born from my own hubris. Always, always. Anytime. I famously step in shit-at least for me it seems pretty epic. I often wind up with a smelly foot in my mouth. I often say the wrong thing, often in the wrong place and time. Often. In my own private Idaho, it's funny as shit. I don't have that gift. I'm better speaking in some other art form. I'm trying to get better. I'm really trying to get better.

You've played characters in pain. What is pain, emotional and physical?
Yeah, I'm kind of done playing those. I think it was more pain tourism. It was still an avoidance in some way. I've never heard anyone laugh bigger than an African mother who's lost nine family members. What is that? I just got R&B for the first time. R&B comes from great pain, but it's a celebration. To me, it's embracing what's left. It's that African woman being able to laugh much more boisterously than I've ever been able to.

"For me this period has been about looking at my weaknesses and failures and owning my side of the street."

When did you have that revelation? What have you been listening to?
I've been listening to a lot of Frank Ocean. I find this young man so special. Talk about getting to the raw truth. He's painfully honest. He's very, very special. I can't find a bad one.

And of great irony to me: Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear [Gaye's touchstone album about divorce]. And that kind of sent me down a road.

Intense.
But beautiful-and quite honest.... You know, I just started therapy. I love it, I love it. I went through two therapists to get to the right one.

About These Parks: To choose the locations for this summertime celebration of America's national parks, Brad Pitt, Ryan McGinley, and GQ Style all collaborated on potential destinations. Pitt requested the lunar dunes of White Sands National Monument. Ryan McGinley had previous experience shooting in the underground labyrinths of Carlsbad Caverns National Park. And we nominated the swamps of Everglades National Park. Then we came together and covered all three over a stretch of eight days in March.

Do you think if the past six months hadn't happened you'd be in this place eventually? That it would have caught up with you?
I think it would have come knocking, no matter what.

People call it a midlife crisis, but this isn't the same-
No, this isn't that. I interpret a midlife crisis as a fear of growing old and fear of dying, you know, going out and buying a Lamborghini. [pause] Actually-they've been looking pretty good to me lately! [laughs]

There might be a few Lamborghinis in your future!
"I do have a Ford GT," he says quietly. [laughs] I do remember a few spots along the road where I've become absolutely tired of myself. And this is a big one. These moments have always been a huge generator for change. And I'm quite grateful for it. But me, personally, I can't remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn't boozing or had a spliff, or something. Something. And you realize that a lot of it is, um-cigarettes, you know, pacifiers. And I'm running from feelings. I'm really, really happy to be done with all of that. I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know-things I wasn't dealing with. I was boozing too much. It's just become a problem. And I'm really happy it's been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I've got my feelings in my fingertips again. I think that's part of the human challenge: You either deny them all of your life or you answer them and evolve.

Was it hard to stop smoking pot?
No. Back in my stoner days, I wanted to smoke a joint with Jack and Snoop and Willie. You know, when you're a stoner, you get these really stupid ideas. Well, I don't want to indict the others, but I haven't made it to Willie yet.

I'm sure he's out there on a bus somewhere waiting for you. How about alcohol-you don't miss it?
I mean, we have a winery. I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground. I had to step away for a minute. And truthfully I could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional. I was good.

So how do you just drop it like that?
Don't want to live that way anymore.

What do you replace it with?
Cranberry juice and fizzy water. I've got the cleanest urinary tract in all of L.A., I guarantee you! But the terrible thing is I tend to run things into the ground. That's why I've got to make something so calamitous. I've got to run it off a cliff.

Do you think that's a thing?
I do it with everything, yeah. I exhaust it, and then I walk away. I've always looked at things in seasons, compartmentalized them, I guess, seasons or semesters or tenures or...

Metaphors are my life.
You strip down to the foundation and break out the mortar. I don't know. For me this period has really been about looking at my weaknesses and failures and owning my side of the street. I'm an asshole when it comes to this need for justice. I don't know where it comes from, this hollow quest for justice for some perceived slight. I can drill on that for days and years. It's done me no good whatsoever. It's such a silly idea, the idea that the world is fair. And this is coming from a guy who hit the lottery, I'm well aware of that. I hit the lottery, and I still would waste my time on those hollow pursuits.

That's the thing about becoming un-numb. You have to stare down everything that matters to you.
That's it! Sitting with those horrible feelings, and needing to understand them, and putting them into place. In the end, you find: I am those things I don't like. That is a part of me. I can't deny that. I have to accept that. And in fact, I have to embrace that. I need to face that and take care of that. Because by denying it, I deny myself. I am those mistakes. For me every misstep has been a step toward epiphany, understanding, some kind of joy. Yeah, the avoidance of pain is a real mistake. It's the real missing out on life. It's those very things that shape us, those very things that offer growth, that make the world a better place, oddly enough, ironically. That make us better.

Would there be art without it? Would there be any of this immense beauty that surrounds us?
Yeah-immense beauty, immense beauty. And by the way: There's no love without loss. It's a package deal.

Can you describe where you've been living-like, have you been in this house since September?
It was too sad to be here at first, so I went and stayed on a friend's floor, a little bungalow in Santa Monica. I crashed over here a little bit, my friend [David] Fincher lives right here. He's always going to have an open door for me, and I was doing a lot of stuff on the Westside, so I stayed at my friend's house on the floor for a month and a half-until I was out there one morning, 5:30, and this surveillance van pulls up. They don't know that I'm up behind a wall, and they pull up-and it's a long story-but it was something more than TMZ, because they got into my friend's computer. The stuff they can do these days.... So I got a little paranoid being there. I decided I had to pick up and come here.

"If I'm not creating something, putting it out there, then I'll just be creating scenarios of fiery demise in my mind."

So you're making stuff?
Yeah, I'm making stuff. It's something I've wanted to do for ten years.

Is the sculpting a Sisyphean thing: rolling the rock up the hill, action obliterating all thoughts? [Jacques interrupts, nuzzling]
I know you've been lonely. I know you've been lonely....

I find it the opposite. Well, I guess so, in that there's a task at hand. You have to wrap your stuff up at night and bring order back to your chaos for the next day. I find it a great opportunity for the introspection. Now you have to be real careful not to go too far that way and get cut off in that way. I'm really good at cutting myself off, and it's been a problem. I need to be more accessible, especially to the ones I love.

When you go dark, do you retreat, disconnect?
I don't know how to answer that. I certainly shield. Shield, shield, shield. Mask, escape. Now I think: That's just me.

You were talking about the Glen character in War Machine and the idea of delusion, that we have to create our own mythologies, our own stories, to explain the things we're not proud of.
At a real cost to ourselves.

"People on their deathbeds don't talk about what they obtained. They talk about their loved ones or their regrets-that seems to be the menu."

When you begin making a family, I think you hope to create another family that is some ideal mix of the best of what you had and what you feel you didn't have-
I try to put these things in front of them, hoping they'll absorb it and that it will mean something to them later. Even in this place, they won't give a shit about that little bust over there or that light. They won't give a shit about that inlay, but somewhere down the road it will mean something-I hope that it will soak in.

It's a different world, too. We know more, we're more focused on psychology. I come from a place where, you know, it's strength if we get a bruise or cut or ailment we don't discuss it, we just deal with it. We just go on. The downside of that is it's the same with our emotion. I'm personally very retarded when it comes to taking inventory of my emotions. I'm much better at covering up. I grew up with a Father-knows-best/war mentality-the father is all-powerful, super strong-instead of really knowing the man and his own self-doubt and struggles. 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.

Do you know, specifically, logistically when you have the kids?
Yeah. We're working at that now.

It must be much harder when visitation is uncertain-
It was all that for a while. I was really on my back and chained to a system when Child Services was called. And you know, after that, we've been able to work together to sort this out. We're both doing our best. I heard one lawyer say, "No one wins in court-it's just a matter of who gets hurt worse." And it seems to be true, you spend a year just focused on building a case to prove your point and why you're right and why they're wrong, and it's just an investment in vitriolic hatred. I just refuse. And fortunately my partner in this agrees. It's just very, very jarring for the kids, to suddenly have their family ripped apart.

That's what I was going to ask-
If anyone can make sense of it, we have to with great care and delicacy, building everything around that.

How do you tell your kids?
Well, there's a lot to tell them because there's understanding the future, there's understanding the immediate moment and why we're at this point, and then it brings up a lot of issues from the past that we haven't talked about. So our focus is that everyone comes out stronger and better people-there is no other outcome.

"I know I'm just in the middle of this thing now-not at the beginning or at the end, just smack-dab in the middle. And I don't want to dodge any of it."

What in the past week has given you immense joy? Can you feel that right now?
It's an elusive thing. It's been a more painful week than normal-just certain things have come up-but I see joy out the window, and I can see the silhouette of palms and an expression on one of my kids' faces, a parting smile, or finding some, you know, moment of bliss with the clay. You know, it's everywhere, it's got to be found. It's the laughter of the African mother in my experience-it's got to come from the blues, to get R&B. That'll be in my book.

Are you going to write a book?
No! I find writing too arduous.

But do you worry about the narrative others have written for you?
What did Churchill say? History will be kind to me: I know because I'll write it myself. I don't really care about protecting the narrative. That's when I get a bit pessimistic, I get in my oh-it-all-goes-away-anyway kind of thinking. But I know the people who love me know me. And that's enough for me.

Do you remember your dreams?
Yeah. A few months ago I was having frightening dreams and I'd consciously lie awake trying to ask, What can I get out of this? What can I learn from this? Those ceased. And now I have been having moments of joy, and you wake and realize it's just a dream, and I get a bit depressed for the moment. Just the moment, just glimpse moments of joy because I know I'm just in the middle of this thing now and I'm not at the beginning of it or at the end of it, just where this chapter is right now, just smack-dab in the middle. It's fucking in the middle of it and, you know, I just don't want to dodge any of it. I just want to stand there, shirt open, and take my hits and see, and see.

There's obviously incredible grief. This is like a death-
Yeah.

There's a process-
Yeah, I think for everyone, for the kids, for me, absolutely.

So is there an urge to try to-
The first urge is to cling on.

Then?
And then you've got a cliché: "If you love someone, set them free." Now I know what it means, by feeling it. It means to love without ownership. It means expecting nothing in return. But it sounds good written. It sounds good when Sting sings it. It doesn't mean fuck-all to me until, you know-

Until you can embody it.
Until you live it. That's why I never understood growing up with Christianity-don't do this, don't do that-it's all about don'ts, and I was like how the fuck do you know who you are and what works for you if you don't find out where the edge is, where's your line? You've got to step over it to know where it is.

For the photo shoot you went to three national parks in a week. It sounds like a boondoggle.
What's the definition of a boondoggle?

Whoa. Then White Sands?
I've never seen anything like it. I mean the dunes are so sculptural and modern and simple and vast and just incredible shapes. To see them white and reflecting white-the sky's actually darker than that ground. It's an odd, beautiful place.

And then the third?
We did Carlsbad Caverns. If we're going to do a celebrity shoot, let's make something, work with an artist, see what we come up with. It's always more interesting.

After all this, do you feel constrained as an actor in some ways?
No, I don't really think of myself much as an actor anymore. It takes up so little of my year and my focus. Film feels like a cheap pass for me, as a way to get at those hard feelings. It doesn't work anymore, especially being a dad.

On the pie chart, what is acting?
Acting would be very small slice.

Do you see yourself as having been successful?
I wish I could just change my name.

Come out as a new person?
Like P. Diddy. I can be Puffy now or-what is Snoop? Lion? I just felt like Brad was a misnomer, and now I just feel like fucking Brad.

What other name would you have put on yourself?
Nothing. When outside success comes, the thing I've enjoyed the most is when there's a personal discovery in it. But when I find it repetitious or painfully boring, it's absolute death to me.

Yeah, in high school he was the boy voted most likely to-
To feel you up. [laughs] I don't know, I guess it's back to feeling. I think I spent a lot of time avoiding feelings and building structures, you know, around feelings. And now I have no time left for that.

Oh man, that's a big question.
I know what the point is-it's communicating, it's connecting. I believe we're all cells in one body; we're all part of the same construct. Although a few of us are cancerous. It's helping others. Yeah, we help each other, that's it.

So what's on the agenda later?
I'm anxious to get to the studio. I think it was Picasso who talked about the moment of looking at the subject, and paint hitting canvas, and that is where art happens. For me I'm having a moment of getting to feel emotion at my fingertips. But to get that emotion to clay-I just haven't cracked the surface. And I don't know what's coming. Right now I know the manual labor is good for me, getting to know the expansiveness and limitations of the materials. I've got to start from the bottom, I've got to sweep my floor, I've got to wrap up my shit at night, you know?

A metaphor again. But it works.
Right now I've got to hammer my own nails.

Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent. This is his first piece for GQ Style.

This story appears in the Summer 2017 issue of GQ Style with the title "Monumental."

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Brad Pitt Talks Divorce, Quitting Drinking, and Becoming a Better Man

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Brad Pitt, in his first interview since his split with Angelina Jolie, opens up about love, loss, and what to do next.

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Pitt opening his own recording studio in France

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Pitt opening his own recording studio in France

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Where Did Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation Go Wrong? (2019)

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The charity organisation was founded by Brad Pitt in 2007 to help rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans two years earlier. However, only a few years later, residents have started filing lawsuits due to uninhabitable conditions increasing in the properties.

“Our porch, the wood is rotten. We have a hole in the porch. The railing came apart. Right now we have problems with the light switches. It's just coming apart,” a resident explained to Architectural Digest in 2019

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Where Did Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation Go Wrong?

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In the wake of a class action lawsuit, AD PRO explores how a well-intentioned aid initiative for Hurricane Katrina victims went awry

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“Angelina Jolie seduced Brad Pitt with sexy trick before Jen Aniston divorce''

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“Angelina Jolie seduced Brad Pitt with sexy trick before Jen Aniston divorce''

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Mr. & Mrs. Smith: “The film that eventually derailed the hottest couple in Hollywood''.

In the press, especially visible in this Mirror article, Jolie gets blamed for breaking up Hollywood's golden couple, Pitt and Aniston.

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie 'fell in love' on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston

While Jennifer Aniston was recording her final series of Friends in the hope of enjoying a quieter life with husband Brad Pitt, he was away working on action film Mr and Mrs Smith.

And in a cruel twist of fate, it would be that film that eventually derailed the hottest couple in Hollywood - who tied the knot 22 years ago today - for it was on set that sparks flew between Brad and is co-star Angelina Jolie.

Rumours of an onset romance began to circulate in 2004. Brad initially denied there had been some "dastardly affair" but later both he and Angelina admitted they had "fallen in love" during filming.

Indeed, Angelina's former bodyguard Mark Behar previously claimed he caught the pair "making out" in their trailers and that he helped pass x-rated notes between them.
For more of the news you care about, straight to your inbox, sign up for one of our daily newsletters here.
"[Angelina] and Brad were constantly laughing and flirting with each other and acting like two school kids who had the hots for each other, and it was so cute," he told Us Weekly.

"I caught them several times in each other's trailers making out. I wasn't shocked at all when they got married years later."

Other on-set sources claimed cheeky Angelina even removed her flesh-coloured underwear during one love scene.

"In the end, she shunned the suit and climbed in bed with him naked! It's the biggest thing we all remember from that film," the source told Us Weekly.

Angelina opened up about her courtship with Brad in 2006, insisting she had no intention of stealing him from Jennifer.

The actress - who shares six children with Brad - said that when they first met, "it was clear he was with his best friend, someone he loves and respects."

She told Vogue: "And so we were both living, I suppose, very full lives... I think we were the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn't. I was quite content to be a single mum."

According to Angelina, she and Brad quickly "became a pair", finding "joy" in everything they did together.

Admitting she "couldn't wait" to get to work each day, she insisted it wasn't until filming ended that they began to contemplate a relationship.

"It took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realise that it might mean something more than we'd earlier allowed ourselves to believe. And both knowing that the reality of that was a big thing, something that was going to take a lot of serious consideration," she said.

"We spent a lot of time contemplating and thinking and talking about what we both wanted in life and realised that we wanted very, very similar things."

They remained "very, very good friends", but when Brad and Jen announced their split in January 2005, Angelina said that's when things changed.

"Then life developed in a way where we could be together, where it felt like something we would do, we should do," she told the fashion bible, in an interview Jennifer would later brand "uncool".

"There was stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening," she said.

"I felt those details were a little inappropriate to discuss. That stuff about how she couldn't wait to get to work every day? That was really uncool."

Brad and Angelina Jolie's romance broke Jennifer's heart, especially when Ange fell pregnant so quickly.

In an unearthed Vanity Fair interview from September that year, Jennifer, then 36, wore her pain on her sleeve when the interviewer broached rumours that Angelina was expecting just two months before Jen and Brad's divorce was even finalised.

Describing how the actress looked like she had been "stabbed in the heart," the reporter said Jen cried silently for several minutes, unable to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks before shaking her head, too hurt to give an answer.

As for whether she believed the gossip that Brad and Ange had had a full-blown affair, Jennifer said, "I choose to believe my husband. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything, but I would much rather choose to believe him."

The line from friends was that he'd wanted to work out what he wanted in life - as a single man - and that he assured Jen, "This is not about another woman."

However, the strength of her belief was shaken when pictured surfaced of Brad playing the doting dad to Angelina's adopted son Maddox on the beach in Africa on April 29.

"I would be a robot if I said I didn't feel moments of anger, of hurt, of embarrassment," Jen said. "I just don't know what happened. There's a lot I don't understand, a lot I don't know, and probably never will know, really.

"I have to think there's some reason I have called this into my life," she added. "I have to believe that - otherwise it's just cruel."

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Angelina Jolie 'seduced Brad Pitt with sexy trick before Jen Aniston divorce'

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie 'fell in love' on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston

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Since Pitt's image and its stability is a brand itself, the actor has  participated in fewer brand endorsements than other celebrities.

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Since Pitt's image and its stability is a brand itself, the actor has  participated in fewer brand endorsements than other celebrities.

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Fits into Redmond's type of the “achieved celebrity'' (2914, p. 6) 

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Fits into Redmond's type of the “achieved celebrity'' (2914, p. 6) 

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This category “derives from the perceived accomplishments of the individual in open competition'' (Rojek, 2001, p. 18)