BRAD: I DUG FRENCH FOOL’S GOLD
‘Obsessed’ with ‘buried treasure’ on estate
So much for a secret money Pitt. Hollywood superstar Brad Pitt has admitted spending a year on a “foolish” dig for buried treasure — just to realize it was all a ruse to get him to invest in a radar company.
The “Moneyball” star told GQ magazine that he was told gold worth millions of dollars was known to be buried under Château Miraval, his 1,000-acre estate in Provence, France.
“I got obsessed,” Pitt, 58, told GQ.
“Like for a year, this was all I could think about, just the excitement of it all,” said the Missouriraised actor.
“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.”
Pitt said he even bought radar equipment during his year scouring the vast estate, which is now part of a bitter lawsuit with his exwife, Angelina Jolie, with whom he bought the property in 2008 and later married there in 2014.
He never found any gold — and later realized the man who told him the initial tall tale had been seeking investments for a radar company. It was not clear if it was the same equipment that Pitt purchased for the dig.
It proved to be “pretty foolish in the end,” Pitt admitted.
“It was just the hunt that was exciting,” said the star, who commands up to $20 million per movie role, according to the GQ profile.
The Miraval estate is located in the village of Correns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in southeastern France. The 35-room mansion is surrounded by lush gardens with a moat, fountains, aqueducts, a pond, chapel and a vineyard.
Pitt bought it with Jolie for $28.4 million, turning it into a multimillion-dollar business and one of the world’s top producers of rosé wine.
He is suing his ex, accusing her of illegally selling off her share of what had become “Pitt’s passion” without his permission.