After seven years of sobriety, Brad Pitt has revealed that he began drinking again but “not in big quantities.”
The F1 star shared the news in a candid interview with Esquire after he offered the interviewer a glass of wine.
“No, I got — I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon,” Pitt said. “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, ‘Yep, nope, not good for me.’ Not in big quantities.”
The 62-year-old actor said that he approaches drinking alcohol differently now and can have “a few” glasses of wine but he “can’t have a lot.”
“I have to be professional about it,” he added.
Pitt previously spoke with GQ about becoming sober in 2017 after he told the outlet that he couldn’t remember “a day” after leaving college when he “wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something.”
The Fight Club actor revealed at the time that he was six months sober and told the outlet that he “stopped everything except boozing when I started my family.”
“I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again,” he said at the time.
Pitt also spoke to the New York Times about his sobriety in 2019 and described his experience after completing a 12-step program.
“You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself,” he said. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself.”
During the wide-ranging interview, Pitt also reflected on his life and recalled “one little period” where he felt he just “didn’t see a way out.”
“I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup,” he told Esquire. “In fact, if I have any afflictions, it’s probably being a congenital optimist. Which has helped many times, and it’s also gotten me – I’ve walked foolishly head-on into a Mack truck because of my optimism. Or, as my forever-funny friend David Fincher will say, ‘Yeah, you see the glass as half full, but it’s half full of urine.’ Anyway, I’ve never been suicidal except for one little period.
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“And in that one little period, I just thought – I just couldn’t – just didn’t see a way out. The pain was so oppressive that – I wasn’t going to act on this, but I could feel – I could feel the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it felt like relief. And I thought, Oh, okay, now I understand – I understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just looking for relief from the pain. But I also think we have incredible survival instincts. And for me, that immediately kicked in, but it was just…
“This sh– ain’t easy and you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”
When asked about what he experienced, Pitt responded with, “family stuff” but did not elaborate.
“We could leave it at that,” Pitt concluded.
Pitt also reflected on grief, describing it as “profound beauty.”
“Grief, if you survive it, leaves a gaping hole, but it also leaves profound beauty,” he said. “It’s an aching beauty, but it’s beauty.”
While the Bullet Train actor didn’t go into specifics about the “one little period,” Pitt had been in a long-running, high-profile dispute with his ex-wife Angelina Jolie following an alleged incident on board a plane with their six children in September 2016.
Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, following the private jet flight from Europe, during which she alleged Pitt physically abused her and their children.
The FBI and child services officials investigated Pitt’s actions on the flight. Two months later, the FBI released a statement saying it would not investigate further, and no charges were filed.
The former couple finally reached a divorce settlement in December 2024, ending one of the longest divorces in Hollywood history.
Jolie and Pitt were among Hollywood’s most prominent pairings for 12 years, two of those years as a married couple. The Oscar winners have six children together: Maddox, 25, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 18.
The Oscar-winning actor also revealed during the interview that he is keeping an open mind when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence in movies.
“There’s a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, $40 to $90 million-budgeted films, get made,” Pitt shared.
When asked if he believes that AI could replicate one of his performances, Pitt told the outlet, “Well, it depends on who’s creating it, you know? Who’s behind it, who’s telling the story. Who’s saying, ‘I want to see this emotion from him,’ and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, ‘More in this direction,’ and tailoring it in that way. So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing.”
Pitt also referred to AI use in movies as “a very interesting experiment.”
He went on to discuss the use of body scanning, which can be used to help in stunt work.
“They’re telling us all to … scan ourselves. I’ve been scanned for the last 20 years, and I’ve always put in my contract: I own them and I destroy them. I should have kept them! All this time I’ve always had them destroyed, because I’m paranoid Ozark boy,” Pitt said.
— with files from The Associated Press