Ryan D’Agostino‘s Brad Pitt interview in the new issue of Esquire is basically a well-written dodge.
The article is about promoting David Ayer‘s Heart of the Beast (Paramount, 9.25), which Pitt calls “a love story.” But c’mon….all anybody wants to know about is the story behind the seeming hostility that two or three of Brad’s kids feel toward him (i.e., legally slicing “Pitt” off of their last names) and their ongoing estrangement over the notorious drunken airplane incident of 2016.
Does D’Agostino try to dig into this? Of course not. Does Pitt offer any particulars? Of course not.
Brad has given up on sobriety, he casually remarks. He’s allowing himself to drink wine, he says, but moderately. (Bad sign.) A photo reveals that he also smokes cigarettes.
The suicide stuff is basically speculative bullshit, but here’s how it appears in the article:
“Yeah,” he says. “I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup. 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. And in that one little period, I just thought…I just couldn’t…[I] 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…”
He pauses, his head kind of rolling around on his neck, grappling, groping.
“Yeah. Like, listen: This shit ain’t easy.”
He stares at me.
“And you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”
HE to God: “I wouldn’t wear this pink-and-beige-colored puffy jacket [above] with a gun at my back.”
Back to D’Agostino: Only Pitt, Jolie, and their children know exactly what’s going on between them all. Her allegations, his quiet, outside of whatever is said in rooms with lawyers and arbiters. But I ask him, less interested in the drama than in its consequences: When we talk about those moments, the ones when the pain was so oppressive that he could imagine feeling cold steel as relief, are we talking about them?
“Kid stuff?” I ask.
He leans forward on an elbow, takes half a breath, and looks across the table at me. “Family stuff,” he says.
He nods, looking at me. I nod.
“Family stuff,” I say. Something changes in the room, something molecular, for just a second. Crossed wires. A frame in black-and-white.
“Family stuff,” he says. “We could leave it at that.”
And who, by the way, is the seventysomething-or-older guy with the sculpted cheekbones and white hair who poses next to Pitt in a couple of photos? Not D’Agostino, who’s apparently 51. Excerpt: “We’re talking about getting old, and we’ve just established our age difference: eleven years. (Pitt is sixty-two.)”