If this were a story about my neighbor, or my brother-in-law Joe, as interesting a person as Joe is, you wouldn’t have read this far. Guy opens the door, guy settles the dogs, guy puts out some cheese and crackers. Guy cleaned his closet earlier. But it’s a story about Brad Pitt, who resides in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all movie stars, not only today but ever, as measured by any metric you like: raw talent, total earnings, handsomeness, box-office gross, natural magnetism, the overall quality and entertainment value of his canon so far. And also intrigue. His protracted divorce from Angelina Jolie, how his children don’t talk to him and reportedly dropped his last name, whatever heartbreaking thing is going on there—you’ve perhaps heard about this, and maybe that is part of the reason you keep reading.
Once the novelty of Brad Pitt preparing grocery-store hors d’oeuvres fades, what comes next is an adherence to the conventions of this meeting. He’s in a new movie, which of course is what he’s had me over here to talk about. The movie, though, turns out to be about something real to him. It turns out to be about resilience in the face of desperation and grabbing at shreds of hope, and when we get into that territory, this meeting, this afternoon, turns into something unexpected. Rare, even. I didn’t see it coming.
We’re talking about getting old, and we’ve just established our age difference: eleven years. (Pitt is sixty-two.) He laughs, and for a flicker of a second he sounds like Floyd, his stoner character from True Romance, which came out more than three decades ago. His eyes are as blue and excitable and seductive as they were in that motel room in Thelma & Louise, before most people knew his name. But he is sixty-two, and there used to be a lot of guys who were older than guys like him. Men like Redford, Hackman, Newman, Duvall, Sutherland. Robert Redford was fifty-five and already a legend when he directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It in 1992. Today Pitt doesn’t love his performance in River as Paul Maclean, the daredevil little brother, the kid who rode the rapids and dated Indians and gambled too much and died young. But he stole the movie, and three years later he received his first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
“God, I want my fifties back,” he says, locking in on me a second. “I would do more. Your fifties are just—man, anything that’s on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.”
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