Brad Pitt believes that the end of his career is near: ‘I consider myself on my last leg’
The actor has opened up in the July issue of ‘GQ’ about his problems with alcohol, his depression and his prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize people’s faces
The writer Ottessa Moshfegh, known for her 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, interviewed Brad Pitt for the July issue of GQ. From the quiet house where he spent the COVID-19 lockdown, which he now considers his “refuge,” he confessed that he could be reaching the twilight of his film career. “I consider myself on my last leg, this last semester or trimester. What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?”
The actor and writer shared an intense conversation, including references to poems by Rumi and Rilke. The actor, who quit tobacco during the pandemic, talked about his drinking problems and his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. “I had a really cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe,” he said. " I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.” The actor stopped drinking in 2016, the year he announced his divorce from Angelina Jolie, with whom he has six children.
Since then, Pitt and Jolie have been embroiled in a legal battle for divorce and custody of the children. Each of the actors has now spent more than a million dollars on legal expenses. Some experts predict that the fight for custody will continue until the children turn 18, reaching legal independence from their parents. For now, Angelina Jolie has custody of the couple’s children.
Pitt confesses to being in a phase of reflection, in which he can finally analyze his past with a new perspective. The actor discusses his problems with depression and his longtime inability to achieve happiness: “I think joy’s been a newer discovery, later in life. I was always moving with the currents, drifting in a way, and onto the next. I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self—the beauty and the ugly—that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy.” After the writer shared that she suspected that she has a broken heart, the actor replied, “I think all our hearts are broken.”
The Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood star has also spoken about a curious problem he has at social events: his inability to remember people’s faces, which can lead other people to think that Pitt is cold or distant. Although he has never had an official diagnosis, the actor suspects that he may suffer from prosopagnosia, a condition that affects the brain’s connection between what he sees and part of the memory dedicated to identification. “Nobody believes me!” says the actor in the interview. “I wanna meet another.”
