Portrait of the actor as kickboxing artist
Brad Pitt and Tom Hardy earn critical acclaim for their side hustles
An artist, an actor and a rock star walked into a gallery in Tampere, Finland on Saturday. Meanwhile 2,257km away, another actor walked into a jiu-jitsu tournament in Milton Keynes in England and began to kick ass and take names. No, this isn’t the elaborate set-up for a joke or the beginning of a social satire directed by Robert Altman, but rather one of those crazy but true things that happens in our ever stranger postpandemic world.
The artist, actor and rock star who turned up in Finland were sculptor Thomas Houseago, renowned for his large-scale wood carvings of disturbingly mythical looking monsters; Brad Pitt, renowned for his middle-aged sculpted abs, chiselled jawline and series of famous former girlfriends and former wife Angelina Jolie; and rock’s dark, maudlin prince, the stick thin, tall, dark-haired suitwearing Australian Nick Cave. Houseago brought along his two celebrity friends to exhibit alongside him at his new show — Pitt with a series of sculptures and Cave with a series of hand-painted ceramics depicting “the life of the Devil in 17 stations”.
The man who turned up in Milton Keynes looked more like a hungover version of Bruce Banner than the characters he’s known for playing, which include the abominable comics character Venom, the Batman nemesis Bane and Mad Max in Fury Road. Tom Hardy was, it seems, doing his utmost to remain incognito as he put himself through an unannounced toughness test that saw the 45year-old beat all his opponents to win the 2022 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Open Championship in Milton Keynes, a town whose most famous attraction is a collection of concrete cow sculptures.
Although the urge to create something other than roles and express oneself in a visual arts medium is not unique to Pitt, this is his public debut and sculpting is not as common an outlet for actors as painting. While he may be more in the news these days for his increasingly slacker Gen-X style choices — and yes, Pitt turned up in Finland wearing a tan boiler suit, large sneakers, a bomber jacket and a floppy hat and looking like an Ozark Mountain weed-dealer — Pitt’s artistic pursuits have been an increasing obsession since his divorce from Jolie in 2016.
In 2017 he told GQ he was working on sculptures and one of his earliest attempts from that period — House A Go Go, made from tree bark and tape — is now on show at the Sarah Hildén Art Museum in Tampere. He began his artistic dabbling with ceramics, a passion he shared with co-star Leonardo DiCaprio who he invited to his studio during the filming of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in America.
Other sculptural works on show in Finland include Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time, — a moulded plaster panel that shows eight figures engaged in a gunfight, which The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones admitted was surprisingly well crafted and hints not just at an obvious comment about violence in the US but also “an inward pain”.
Jones wrote that, in spite of his initial impetus to ridicule the actor, he had to begrudgingly acknowledge that the man in the weed-dealer outfit “is an extremely impressive artist”.
Tom Hardy’s performance hasn’t been critically assessed but it’s fair to say that his opponents, while initially surprised at his appearance on the mat, soon found him to be not only “a really nice guy” but also — as one of them told the press — “one of the toughest opponents [he’d ever faced]”.
So this is what the world is coming to. Pitt and Hardy quietly — dare one say even modestly — showing their side-hustles to the world and earning plaudits on their own terms rather than on the back of their celebrity status or as promoters for nonsense brands such as George Clooney’s tequila or Pitt former girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop vagina-scented candles.
What’s more, in both cases the media hasn’t had to pretend that either of these men are emperors wearing clothes whose work they have to like because of who they are. They haven’t had to search for something nice to say as they’ve had to about the appalling sculptural crimes of Miley Cyrus, the tenth-rate Jackson Pollock imitations of Ed Sheeran, the sentimental watercolours of King Charles III or the shrivelled toes-in-the-bath painted musings of George W Bush. If anything, Pitt and Hardy’s respective weekend outings have only served to reinforce their public personas as honest, tough but also sensitive modern middle-aged men with personal grooming issues we’re willing to ignore.
The people we should really feel sorry for are the real 24/7 working artists, Thomas Houseago, whose show in Finland was supposed to be an opportunity to demonstrate his new move away from sculpture into painting but has now become the Brad Pitt “impressive artist” show; and the poor reigning Milton Keynes jiu-jitsu champion who was all set for a blowout victory party at the Dog and Dragon before Venom walked into town.