On the kitchen island, which is the size of some small kitchens, he goes to work. He unwraps a wedge of yellow Gouda from its supermarket shrink-wrap and slices almost the whole thing, arranging the slices neatly on a board. Then he goes after a chunk of Parmesan the same way. (People will ask later, “Was there someone helping him? Like staff?” There was not. There was Brad Pitt in his
kitchen slicing cheese.)
He opens two varieties of cracker: one that resembles Wheat Thins but is better and those crispy dark-brown ones with dried cranberries or something in them. Then he unsheathes a salami from its plastic casing and slices that up too. It’s black on the outside, encrusted in black pepper.
“I was cutting one of these up last week and I walked away for a minute. Came back? Gone. The whole sausage,” he says as he nods toward Sundae. “And no problem, either. But I gave this one a breath mint after, which she needed, and right away there was just, like, trails of vomit. You know the kind that’s hard to clean up? Like finger paint?”
He carries the charcuterie board and the basket of crackers to a table at the far end of the room, past the island’s acreage, past the cozy sitting area in front of the gas fireplace (which is on), by the glass doors that open onto the patio around the pool and the palm trees he bought and had planted around the pool (“because I’m a tree freak”) and, beyond that, the endless city. He bought this home in Los Angeles last fall. He has spent a total of three sporadic weeks in it.
In his fifties Pitt starred in eleven movies, produced seventeen, and won an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. He’s attacking his sixties hard too. Just now he’s coming off two and a half years of continuous work, the longest stretch of his career. There was the release of the blockbuster F1, including an extended international press tour. Then he shot, in succession, Heart of the Beast, an intense man-and-his-dog story coming out this fall, in New Zealand; a new film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher, in which Pitt picks up his Oscar—winning role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth; and, finishing just a few weeks ago, The Riders, a dark thriller set to come out next year.
We pull down the little Perriers pretty quick, and I point out that he offered me wine earlier. At an awards ceremony in 2020, he thanked his friend Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober and talked more deeply about his sobriety on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, last June. I ask him if the wine is something for guests?
“No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.” Little laugh. He raises his famous opposing-diacritic eyebrows and holds a finger up: “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”
“You can have a glass of wine.” “Yeah. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.” He likes mornings now anyway, and you can miss a lovely morning when you drink too much the night before, and it’s just not as interesting. Mornings are interesting, and he doesn’t want any more of them to go by unseen. Even on a day like today. His place affords travel-magazine views of the city, but today clouds blot out the blue from horizon to horizon, like pulled cotton. It’s typical for this time of year, but most hosts would have apologized for the sky not being blue on the day of my visit. Not Pitt. He surveys the sky, smiles, and says, “June gloom. I love June gloom. It’s just so much more contemplative and introspective.”
BP On Loss:
He looks up, then back at me, and says, “I think grief is probably the most leveling of all emotions.” He holds the edge of the table with his fingers and shakes his head back and forth a millimeter, a flinch, so fast you could miss it. “That’s an understatement, even. Loss is certainly the most profound thing a human can endure. And the loneliness that can ensue is the greatest torture.” It’s the voice he used to say “attack your fifties” but less urgent, offered not as advice but shibboleth.
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