Brad Pitt has come a long way since his first role as “guy at beach with drink” in the 1987 comedy Hunk, but after three decades in Hollywood, the Pitt-bull could be ready to call it quits. The actor caused quite a stir when he alluded to the twilight years of his acting career, telling GQ in a candid interview that his time on the screen has almost reached its end.
"I consider myself on my last leg," the actor told Ottessa Moshfegh during a frank discussion with GQ Magazine. "This last semester or trimester. What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?"
Pitt began his career in 1987, but it wasn’t until his first major film role in the buddy crime drama Thelma & Louise that his career really took. Pitt became a staple of the silver screen during the ‘90s and found critical success for his roles in A River Runs Through It, 12 Monkeys, and the cult-classic Fight Club.
Check out a young Brad Pitt as “guy at beach with drink” in the clip below.
His success continued through the aughts and the 2010s — with roles in The Departed and Inglourious Basterds — but Pitt is nearly 60 years old and might be ready ‘exit stage left’ one final time.
In the same GQ piece, Quentin Tarantino — who directed Pitt in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and Inglourious Basterds — equated the actor’s star quality to Hollywood legends Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Steve McQueen.
"He's one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars," Tarantino told the mag. "It's just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don't think you can describe exactly what that is because it's like describing starshine. I noticed it when we were doing Inglourious Basterds. When Brad was in the shot, I didn’t feel like I was looking through the viewfinder of the camera. I felt like I was watching a movie. Just his presence in the four walls of the frame created that impression.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Pitt spoke about getting sober after his divorce from Angelina Jolie in 2016: “I had a really cool men’s group here [in Los Angeles] that was really private and selective, so it was safe, because I’d seen things of other people, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.”
Source: GQ Magazine, Insider