Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.
Already a member?
Log in
Brad Pitt hasn’t talked about what happened on that plane. Angelina Jolie hasn’t either. But the events of that September 2016 trip from France to Los Angeles are subject to bitter online consternation to this day. In court documents after she filed for divorce in 2016, Jolie accused Pitt of physical and emotional abuse on board the flight, which Pitt denied. He was later investigated and cleared by multiple agencies. Pitt, meanwhile, has accused his ex-wife of alienating their six children against him, which Jolie has denied.
It has now been a decade since the pair’s high-profile split, which brought to a sudden end a union that had previously made Pitt and Jolie Hollywood’s premiere golden couple, identified succinctly with the ludicrous moniker of Brangelina. Anonymous sources from both star’s camps continue to feed quotes to the US publication People Magazine, which is generally regarded as a mouthpiece for Hollywood publicists eager to propagate particular narratives about their clients. As much as their divorce was finalised in 2024, they remain in a legal battle over ownership of a French winery, and in recent months four of their children have legally removed “Pitt” from their surnames.
You will hear about this on the internet, where Pitt has become a polarising, divisive figure of late. But it’s rarely discussed outside of it, with Pitt arguably never more beloved and celebrated as a movie star. His press appearances, too, are carefully choreographed, any elephants in the room left pointedly unaddressed. He has a new movie out today, a man-and-dog survival film titled Heart of the Beast. When it came to promoting it, Pitt has been business as usual. There were vague allusions to familial breakdown and personal struggles in a big, fawning Esquire cover story in August, but nothing conclusive. He’s talked a lot about his canine co-star. Pitt has, in other words, prevailed, breezing over the sort of scandal that could very well have destroyed him. Ed Sheeran must be seething.
Aiding Pitt in this extensive form of myth-making has been his recent run of roles, which seem designed to craft the appearance of a troubled if soulful elder statesman of film. Pitt doesn’t so much play characters any more as he does extensions of his screen image, which is clung to like a comfort blanket rather than – as it used to be – distorted or tweaked.
There was Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which won him an Oscar in 2020, and cast him as a louche, rogueish fixer to a superstar, who cleans up Hollywood mess with a scalpel blade of tricks and muscle. He whips his shirt off at one point, nearly three decades in the wake of Thelma & Louise, and it’s still about as dazzling as any special effect. Wolfs, a little-seen Apple TV hang-out of a film from 2024, seemed built around the apparent allure of watching Pitt and his fellow handsome old-timer George Clooney shoot the breeze together. Then there was F1, a box office smash last summer, and Pitt’s role as a wizened, nomadic race-car driver lured out of retirement to teach young’uns a thing or two about winning. And it continues with Heart of the Beast, which is rooted in themes of rugged, all-American male resilience. Pitt plays dudes now. Cool, haunted, beautiful dudes. They’ve proven enormously distracting.
Perhaps it was always going to be this way. Pitt suffered little in the way of reputational damage when he was involved in his first big celebrity scandal more than 20 years ago, when rumours surfaced that he and Jolie had embarked on an affair while filming the action movie Mr & Mrs Smith, all while Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston. Pitt and Jolie claimed no infidelity had taken place, but did confirm that they had fallen in love while working together. Regardless, narratives quickly crystallised in the tabloids, which covered the relationship ferociously. Jolie was the slippery temptress who’d seduced a married man. Aniston was the jilted spouse doomed to romantic tragedy. Pitt was… sort of irrelevant.
.jpeg)
Those tropes, as maddening as it is to say, remain firmly in place today. Tabloids have constantly seemed to will further Aniston break-ups into existence. And whether it is partly motivated by her own humanitarian work or sheer disinterest in playing the Hollywood game anymore, Jolie seems to be on the fringes of the film industry at this point. She primarily stars in independent films that few see, while her last big Oscar play – a 2024 biopic about Maria Callas – was snubbed by major awards bodies. Pitt, meanwhile, is a studio movie staple with a bulletproof reputation. Heart of the Beast is the first of two Pitt vehicles arriving this year, the other being a David Fincher-directed spin-off of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It could even net him more Oscar attention, if the stars align just right.
In interviews, Pitt has gestured towards past setbacks, last year discussing (if obliquely) his journey to sobriety during an appearance on Dax Shepard’s largely anodyne, celebrity-friendly podcast. And while he told Esquire last month that he’d recently broken seven years of sobriety (“I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it”), he didn’t really explain the reasons why. Likewise when he dropped the bombshell that he had experienced “one little period” of feeling suicidal. Asked by journalist Ryan D’Agostino if that period coincided with, ambiguously, “kid stuff”, meaning the breakdown of his marriage, Pitt nodded. “Family stuff,” he replied. “We could leave it at that.” And he did.
This approach to scandal – always giving away just enough to seem introspective, self-aware and all-together human – might be the secret to Pitt’s continued success. Particularly when his latest press tour has coincided with that of another movie star behemoth navigating a laundry list of personal quirks (Scientology, ambiguous singledom) while plugging a new film. Someone, too, whose famous and reportedly estranged child, Suri, has also changed their surname this year. And someone who seems to be going about it all wrong. That person is Tom Cruise, a deeply unusual celebrity whose recent run of interviews have been even less probing than Pitt’s.
Cruise chatted about the wonder and dazzle of filmmaking for GQ this month, and decidedly did not discuss anything else (“The biggest misconception about me? I don’t know. I really have no idea. I’m not sitting here thinking about that stuff”). He said nothing on Taylor Swift’s husband’s podcast, and dangled from a life-size claw machine on Jimmy Fallon’s chat show. Box office tracking suggests his new movie Digger will be one of the year’s biggest bombs.
Pitt and Cruise are sometimes termed the last real movie stars; symbols of a film industry that no longer exists. But Pitt endures because he’s still very good at acting like an ordinary human being, and also knows when and where to lean back into the handsome, well-preserved masculinity that made him a star in the first place. When Cruise poses for GQ, his shirt open and his hand threateningly pulling down the waistband of his jeans as if he’s about to show the world his Xenu, it gives argh rather than alluring.
Cruise doesn’t seem to understand the contemporary marketplace, but Pitt – or at least his advisors – seems to take to it spectacularly. Lean into nostalgia. Nod to introspection. Keep things vague. Play the parts you know your fans will love. Then voila! The more damaging headlines will fade away in an instant. Presumably Johnny Depp, gearing up for the release of his first studio movie in years next month, is watching carefully.
‘Heart of the Beast’ is in cinemas
