This month: The swaggering, enigmatic, franchise-allergic king of cool, BRAD PITT
HOW LONG DOES it take to make a movie star?
Fourteen minutes, it turns out. Eight hundred and 40 seconds. Just a nudge over 20,000 frames of film.
That’s how long Brad Pitt spends on screen in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991). Less time than it takes to get popcorn if there’s a queue. He arrives towards the start of act two, drifting into focus in a rear-view mirror. He sheds his shirt, sweats tastefully (Ridley Scott took it upon himself to personally spritz the newcomer’s abs with Evian), re-enacts a bank heist with a hairdryer, sleeps with Thelma, steals some cash, and bolts.
And, at the end of it all, he has seamlessly transitioned from being a ‘struggling bit-part player’ to ‘next big thing’. Or, as Scott would later, more succinctly, put it, “Bingo. There it is. The start of Brad Pitt. Right there.”
So, what precise alchemy occurs in that quarter-hour? There is, of course, the fact that — and steady yourself as this may come as a shock — Brad Pitt is a handsome man. Strike that. For the last 30 years, Pitt has defined what handsomeness means. His name would become a kind of shorthand for male beauty, as in: “You’re no Brad Pitt!” But… so what? Then, as now, if you had spat in Burbank you’d have hit a dozen flaxen-haired, cornfed specimens, straight in from the heartlands, who, if they were unlikely ever to grace the stage of the Kodak Theater clutching a golden statuette, had a fair-to-middling shot at an Abercrombie & Fitch carrier bag at some point.
There must, of course, be something else. But it’s a something else that’s fiendishly difficult to put your finger on. There’s the broad, boyish grin, the barely contained energy. The pink hairdryer. Whatever the ingredients are, in those few minutes they snap into tight focus, like J.D. in Geena Davis’ rear-view mirror.
Regardless of how, or why, it happened, the fascinating thing about Pitt’s career subsequent to that sudden, incandescent arrival is how, despite emerging as one of the biggest stars
Hollywood has produced in the last couple of generations, elusive, evasive even, he has been about embracing the role.
Consider: if you discount the Ocean’s Eleven movies, which were ensemble pieces anyway, there is no Brad Pitt franchise, nothing to stand against Tom Cruise’s Missions: Impossible or Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. His conventional leading-man parts are a distinct minority; vanishingly small in number, in fact, compared to the quirky, eccentric roles, arthouse turns or unexpected cameos. Apart from a brief, barely visible turn as The Vanisher in Deadpool 2, furnished apparently for the price of a latte, there has been no toe-dipping into comic-book franchises. He has gently dodged and weaved his way through a fascinating career, maintaining his almost consistent box-office appeal, without ever, or at least, very rarely, pandering to it.
Discerning any consistency, any Brad Pitt ‘type’, is almost impossible. But if there is one constant to the best of his work, the roles where he really gets under the skin, it’s a kind of fascinating, understated unknowability, a slightly ethereal not-quite-thereness that mesmerises rather than, as might be expected, frustrates. They’re his most interesting performances (and they’re not necessarily in his best films). You can see it (or, rather, not quite) in his doomed youth in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It; in his slightly ghostly but irresistibly moving turn as Sean Penn’s buttoned-up father in The Tree Of Life, and most recently in his quietly enigmatic turn as an astronaut with daddy issues in James Gray’s Ad Astra.
We may have decided Brad Pitt was a copper-bottomed movie star when we first saw him, pink hairdryer and all. Hollywood may have had a similar idea. But Brad Pitt? He’s always been less convinced.
WILLIAM BRADLEY PITT was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, to William Pitt, the boss of a transportation company, and Jane, a school counsellor. The family soon moved to Springfield, Missouri, where Pitt describes
an idyllic childhood. “We were surrounded by cornfields, which was weird because we always had canned vegetables. I could never figure that one out,” he once said. “But ten minutes out of town and you start getting into forests and rivers and the Ozark Mountains. Stunning country.”
He attended Kickapoo High School where his interests included golf, swimming and the debate club. There was never any noticeable interest in acting. But seeing Saturday Night Fever, he has said, made an outsized impression. He’d snuck in underage, but it wasn’t the star wattage of John Travolta or the precision rug-cutting that left him changed. It was the scenes around the dinner table, the loud arguments, disagreements and family energy that fascinated him. His own family was if not repressed, conventional and buttoned up. Saturday Night Fever’s arguing Manero family, the polar opposite of his own, piqued an interest in, if not necessarily film, the world further afield than Springfield, Missouri.
Yes. Kickapoo. Let’s move on.
At college he studied journalism, hatching a wiser-than-his-years plan to ditch the reportage and pursue a career as an art director for some swanky Madison Avenue advertising agency. But, two credits shy of graduating, he suddenly abandoned both college and hackery, moving to Los Angeles with the newly declared intention of making it as an actor.
It was a sudden, and still slightly inexplicable, development. “I always knew
I was going somewhere,” he said of the decision. “I knew. I just knew. There were a lot more points of view out there. I wanted to see them, to hear them. I had always liked film as a teaching tool. As a way of getting exposed to ideas that would never have been presented to me. But it just wasn’t on my list of career options growing up. Then it occurred to me, literally two weeks before graduation: ‘If the opportunity isn’t here, I’ll go to it.’ So simple. But it had never occurred to me.”
In Hollywood he performed the traditional rites of the aspiring actor. You might have encountered some of Pitt’s early work when he perfectly captured the inner turmoil of the El
Pollo Loco chicken, handing out flyers for the fast-food joint on Sunset and La Brea. There were the cattle calls, extra work and stop-gap jobs, one of which, crucially it would turn out, was ferrying strippers gig-to-gig in a limo.
“My job was to get them there, get them home, collect the money, play the music, and catch the clothes,” he remembered. “It was a very interesting education and paid really well, so I did it for three months and then decided I was going to move on. The boss said, ‘Alright, but just come in one last night. I need you to do Sunday, I’m in a pinch.’ And this woman turned out to be dating an actor. I didn’t know any actors or know anyone who knew any actors. She said that she started this [acting] class an actor had told her to go to. I asked for the name and went to check it out.”
The name was Roy London, and the direction was indeed good. Though Pitt didn’t know it at the time, London was one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. In a town full of ‘acting coaches’, London was the real deal. He didn’t advertise, there was no name on his small studio’s door, appointments were by introduction only — but London helped incubate the careers of Geena Davis, Hank Azaria, Patricia Arquette, Patrick Swayze and Jeff Goldblum, among dozens of others.
“I’m fresh in from Missouri. I don’t know anything about the arts, the profession. Had zero technique. Then I met Roy. He was tough, lovely, compassionate. He loved film and he loved storytelling. I worked with him for three years and then I started getting some work. I give him full credit.”
But if Roy London provided the training, and Ridley Scott the entrance, it was Robert Redford with A River Runs Through It (1992) who first tapped into what might be the essence of Pitt’s enduring screen appeal. Redford was smart enough to deploy Pitt’s obvious assets to the full, like Ridley Scott drenching his young star, either in dappled sunlight or river water, whenever the opportunity presented itself. But he also tapped into a darker, more anguished side, a perfectly judged counter-note to Pitt’s sunny good looks. There’s the freewheeling sexiness of Thelma’s J.D. in his depiction of Paul Maclean, a rebellious, card-playing maverick, but seasoned with a fatalism that Redford himself had channelled in his early roles.
“His is the character I would have played if
I was younger, the golden boy but having a dark side,” Redford reminisced in 2017. “I felt we needed somebody who appeared to be a golden character and then we would find out that there was a flaw that would lead to his demise. Brad had that. When he first came in, he had a look about him. I said, ‘Yeah, he’s going to succeed.’”
THE PERIOD BETWEEN A River Runs Through It in 1992 and Troy in 2004, the years when he would dominate both the ‘sexiest man alive’ polls and the tabloids with his ill-fated marriage to Jennifer Aniston, are marked by Pitt’s own ambivalence about the kind of commodity he was becoming. There were a few conventional movies: Interview With The Vampire (1994), Legends Of The Fall (1994), Sleepers (1996) and The Devil’s Own (1997) were all the kind of solid star vehicles that an agent would serve up to their client with a silver bow, or at least a muffin basket. But Pitt, serviceable as he was in all of them, seemed slightly ill-at-ease with the whole notion of a vehicle, star or otherwise.
“It’s just not my interest,” he said in 2012 of Hollywood’s desire to frame him as an easy-tomarket leading man. “I grew up on movies that said something to me as a kid from Missouri, movies that showed me places I’d not yet travelled or cultures I’d yet to see. I wanted to make movies like that. It was less about a career than making movies I wanted to see.”
Interview With The Vampire, in particular, was by all accounts a miserable experience. Author Anne Rice’s vehement opposition to the casting of Tom Cruise as ageless bloodsucker Lestat de Lioncourt (which she would later recant) extended by implication to Pitt, who found to his dismay, when he finally received a screenplay two weeks before shooting commenced, that the elements in the character of The Vampire he had initially found fascinating had been purged from the script.
The production was also overshadowed by the death of River Phoenix, who had been replaced as the titular interviewer by Christian Slater. Halfway through production a profoundly unhappy Pitt, who had found the dismal winter days shooting at Pinewood to be oppressive and depressing, asked producer David Geffen how much it would cost to get him off the project. The unblinking mogul had replied that it would come in at about $40 million. Pitt, perhaps on the advice of his accountant, remained. But it seems that the experience was another nail in the coffin of Hollywood’s plans for him.
Whatever the turning point, by the mid-’90s he had begun to make, if not a complete move away from popcorn fare, a decided turn towards the arthouse. Key to this realisation seems to have been the very different experience of working with David Fincher — a former poppromo director whose Hollywood debut, Alien3, had been a muchreported debacle — on his
sophomore effort. “I read the first three pages of Seven and I just tossed it,” said Pitt. “You know, it’s about a new cop who wants in and an old cop who wants out. I thought I had heard that story. And Cynthia [Pitt’s longtime manager Cynthia Pett-dante] said, ‘No, just read it. Read it, read it, read it!’ And I did. And then
I met with Fincher. And it was really sitting down with someone where we were talking the same language. The same love of films, the same irritation with film.”
As with his character in A River Runs Through It, Pitt’s fascination seemed to be with playing a character who is doomed from the start. As he later put it, “There’s this American hubris to thinking you have the world figured out. He sees the world in black and white, good and bad, and he pays in a big way for that.” Hardly, then, the conventional emotional arc for a Hollywood hero.
For the latter part of the ’90s Pitt would be found pursuing more and more of the kind of quirky, box-office-ambivalent projects in which he had come to feel most at home. There was 12 Monkeys (1995), Seven Years In Tibet (1997), Meet Joe Black (1998), and Guy Ritchie’s
Snatch (2000), to which he brought his undoubted star-heft as well as an Irish accent so impressively impenetrable his castmates were apparently as bewildered as audiences. With its cult credentials now well established, it’s easy to forget that even Fight Club (1999), a film that may not have aged well (is it, when it comes down to brass tacks, much more than a seductively slick outgrowth of the lad-movement of the ’90s? — discuss), was a personal risk, and a box-office disappointment, finally just inching over the $100 million mark. (Though, interestingly, in Tyler Durden Pitt may have delivered an acid critique of the very idea of the kind of movie beefcake into which the industry was trying to mould him. “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck,” he informs Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator, who is as besotted with Durden as Geena Davis’ Thelma is with J.D., before turning out to be a product of Norton’s diseased mind.)
But if he was to ever acquiesce to the studio’s insistent demand that he become the kind of star they had always wanted him to be, as he approached his forties in the early 2000s, time was running out. In 2002 he finally gave in and signed for the lead in Wolfgang Petersen’s swords ’n’ sandals epic Troy. It was a decision he would come to regret.
FOR THE STUDIO bean-counters, Troy was an obvious slam-dunk: an established star in a leather tunic with a reliable triple-a director was the formula that had delivered Gladiator, a stratospheric commercial hit, just four years before. But the omens were not good from the start. With sublime irony, Pitt damaged his Achilles tendon early in the shoot, putting the production on hiatus for several weeks. When shooting finally got underway, Petersen, a competent journeyman, didn’t seem certain how to use his leading man. In his previous work Pitt’s strength had been his oblique takes on characters, his ‘not-wholly-thereness’, not the kind of sweaty on-the-nose heroics that Troy demanded. “I pulled out of another movie and then had to do something for the studio,” he remembered. “Troy wasn’t painful, but I realised that the way that movie was being told was not
how I wanted it to be. I could not get out of the middle of the frame! It was driving me crazy! I’d become spoiled working with David Fincher. Every shot was like, ‘Here’s the hero!’ There was no mystery. So I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films.”
And indeed, since Troy, Pitt has continued his meandering superstar odyssey. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008) was a misfire for both him and David Fincher, hampered by VFX that hadn’t matured enough, and a creepily unappealing central conceit. He was much better in The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007), bringing a lunatic edginess to the first of the title roles. But if anything, the past few years have proved that he is, at heart, a character actor in a leading man’s body, whose natural habitat is the devastating supporting role. He chewed scenery as Lt. Aldo Raine, “killin’ Nazis” in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). He turned in a brace of superbly contrasting second-string performances as dimwit fitness coach Chad Feldheimer in the Coens’ Burn After Reading (2008) and then as
Sean Penn’s distant, repressed father in Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life (2011). His death by ‘bolito’ in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor
(2013) is a bloody triumph to rival John Hurt’s demise in Alien.
On a professional level, it’s difficult to detect even a whiff of the diva-ish tendencies that begin to afflict even the most well-balanced actor after a while sequestered in the star bubble, with its destabilising atmosphere of precision ass-kissing. “I like Brad because he’s not a cock,” as Guy Ritchie put it shortly after wrapping Snatch (the two had become friends after Pitt saw, and was delighted with, Ritchie’s Cockney caper Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels).
“He’s about as far from a cock as you can be. And it’s quite easy to be a cock in his position. It comes for free; you have a licence to be a cock. There has to be some degree of cognisance, a lack of cockery doesn’t just happen organically.” Brad Pitt. Not a cock, then.
On the contrary, if Pitt has a psychological quirk, it’s the regular attacks of the thespian collywobbles that descend, usually three or four weeks before the cameras roll.
“Two weeks before any given project Brad calls and says, ‘I’ve betrayed you, you have the wrong guy, here’s your opportunity to get rid of me now,’” David Fincher has said. “He’s not neurotic, he doesn’t second-guess himself. He just needs to get that out of his system.”
But Pitt’s elusiveness, his reluctance to fully commit to the whole ‘movie-star thing’, has come at a cost. There’s something pleasingly appropriate that his sole, and well-deserved, acting Oscar win was as supporting actor in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,
though he was robbed of even a nomination for possibly his most subtle recent work in the messy but mesmerising Ad Astra the same year.
Now 57, Pitt can look back on one of the most eclectic, consistently surprising careers of any of the stars who came of age in the ’90s. If Once Upon A Time In Hollywood had the slight feel of a premature swansong, there might be something to it. He recently mused that he’ll likely be doing less and less starry stuff in front of the camera. “I’m on the producing side and I enjoy that a lot. But I really believe that overall acting is a younger man’s game. Not that there aren’t substantial parts for older characters — I just feel the game itself, it’ll move on naturally.” For most stars it’d be a disappointment. But it’s in those smaller, less ‘substantial’ roles that Pitt has often dazzled. Here’s to many more of them.