Brad Pitt, at 55, is ready to open up.
LOS ANGELES — Brad Pitt has played his fair share of stoic characters, including two this year: Cliff Booth, the stunt man who sauntered through the summer hit “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and Roy McBride, an astronaut shuttled to remote, lonely outposts of the galaxy in the coming “Ad Astra.”
While he has proved that he can play a motormouth in films like “12 Monkeys” and “Snatch,” Mr. Pitt is at his most alluring when holding something in reserve. It feels like you’re watching a man who says no more than he needs to.
“I grew up with that be-capable, be-strong, don’t-show-weakness thing,” Mr. Pitt said. He was raised in Missouri, the oldest of three children, his father the owner of a trucking company. Now, at 55, he’s reached a point where he sees his dad in every performance he gives. “In some ways, I’m copying him,” Mr. Pitt said. “He had grown up in extreme hardship and poverty, always dead set on giving me a better life than he had — and he did it. But he came from that stoic ilk.”
That lineage has served Mr. Pitt better onscreen than off, and he is giving hard thought to the person he has become.
“I’m grateful that there was such an emphasis on being capable and doing things on your own with humility, but what’s lacking about that is taking inventory of yourself,” he said. “It’s almost a denial of this other part of you that is weak and goes through self-doubts, even though those are human things we all experience. Certainly, it’s my belief that you can’t really know yourself until you identify and accept those things.”
James Gray, a writer and director of “Ad Astra,” and Mr. Pitt have been friends for more than two decades, ever since the actor saw the director’s 1995 debut, a low-budget crime drama called “Little Odessa.” At the time, Mr. Pitt said he felt that Mr. Gray could coax something new out of him. “He had this ’70s touch, like the films I was weaned on,” Mr. Pitt said. “There was a roughness to him, a violence. And he seemed to be focused on men.”
They were determined to collaborate, but there were false starts. In 2010, Mr. Pitt dropped out of Mr. Gray’s jungle epic, “The Lost City of Z.” Years later, Mr. Gray would go to Mr. Pitt with “Ad Astra,” expecting him to turn that down, too.
“My only quibble with Brad on a professional level is that he doesn’t star in movies enough. I think he’s able to command the screen in a way very few other people can, and I wish I saw that all the time,” Mr. Gray said.
If Mr. Pitt is quieter in person and more thoughtful than you might expect, so is “Ad Astra.” To be sure, there are some striking action sequences as Mr. Pitt’s character combs the galaxy in search of his missing astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones). But “Ad Astra” is more concerned with its protagonist’s inner life than the magnificent starscape outside his spacecraft, and long stretches pass with only Mr. Pitt onscreen, his voice-over pondering life’s profundities.
“We’re asking questions like, ‘What’s it all about?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ That’s a bit of a minefield, because there are so many traps,” Mr. Pitt said. But the loneliness of the character appealed to him: “We wanted to investigate the inability to connect with others, and the self-protection mechanisms one builds up that keep us from really being open.”
Openness is something Mr. Pitt has been thinking about a lot lately. It is a quality that does not always come easily to men, and no one would begrudge him if he wanted to seal off parts of himself. “But the ultimate place for my style of acting, as I understand it, is to get to a place of just absolute truth,” Mr. Pitt said. “I’ve got to be experiencing something that’s real to me for it to read real to you.”
In early 2017, when Mr. Pitt committed to starring in “Ad Astra,” he was still reeling from his split from Angelina Jolie, with whom he has six children. “He definitely used the stimuli from his life,” Mr. Gray said. “Now, I didn’t get personal with him about it at all — I don’t think it’s my business, or even my job — but he investigated the essence of the character through himself.”
Was “Ad Astra” a way to work through some of the loneliness? “The fact is, we all carry pain, grief and loss,” Mr. Pitt said. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. So you open up those boxes.”
It was reported that the final straw in Mr. Pitt’s 11-year relationship with Ms. Jolie came in September 2016, when they fought about his drinking. Now, Mr. Pitt is committed to his sobriety. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he said. Mr. Pitt spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous.
His recovery group was composed entirely of men, and Mr. Pitt was moved by their vulnerability. “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Mr. Pitt said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
No one from the group sold Mr. Pitt’s stories to the tabloids. The men trusted one another, and in that trust, he found catharsis. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself,” he said. “There’s great value in that.”
According to Mr. Gray, Mr. Pitt’s ego has little to do with choosing a part. “He’s always advocating for less exposition and fewer lines,” Mr. Gray said. “I don’t think Brad necessarily likes being the center of attention — he has to be shoved in that direction.”
To hear Mr. Pitt tell it, supporting roles offer some sort of reprieve: He’s been the center of the world’s attention since his 1991 breakout role in “Thelma & Louise,” so why would he always need that in his work?
“In the ’90s, all that attention really threw me,” Mr. Pitt said. “It was really uncomfortable for me, the cacophony of expectations and judgments. I really became a bit of a hermit and just bonged myself into oblivion.”
Everything he did then was scrutinized: His hits, his misses, his hair, his body and especially his romances. His life, Mr. Pitt said, wasn’t “the lottery it appeared from the outside.” It got to the point that he could no longer tell his own feelings and wants apart from the ones impressed upon him by others. Eventually, he learned to shrug off everyone else’s expectations.
“Those dubious thoughts, the mind chatter, the rat in the skull — that’s comedy,” Mr. Pitt said. “It’s just ridiculous that we would beat ourselves up that way. It doesn’t matter. I spent too much of life wrestling with those thoughts, or being tethered to those thoughts, or caged by those thoughts.”
Mr. Pitt recently called acting “a younger man’s game,” and in his mid-50s, he has found himself increasingly drawn to other pursuits, like producing. He said he won’t be starring in as many movies.
“It’ll be fewer and farther in between for me, just because I have other things I want to do now,” said Mr. Pitt, whose interests include sculpting and landscaping. “When you feel like you’ve finally got your arms around something, then it’s time to go get your arms around something else.”
“The ultimate place for my style of acting, as I understand it, is to get to a place of just absolute truth.” BRAD PITT Actor and producer