After seven years of sobriety, Brad Pitt has revealed that he began drinking again but “not in big quantities.”
The F1 star shared the news in a candid interview with Esquire after he offered the interviewer a glass of wine.
“No, I got — I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon,” Pitt said. “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, ‘Yep, nope, not good for me.’ Not in big quantities.”
The 62-year-old actor said that he approaches drinking alcohol differently now and can have “a few” glasses of wine but he “can’t have a lot.”
“I have to be professional about it,” he added.
Pitt previously spoke with GQ about becoming sober in 2017 after he told the outlet that he couldn’t remember “a day” after leaving college when he “wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something.”
The Fight Club actor revealed at the time that he was six months sober and told the outlet that he “stopped everything except boozing when I started my family.”
“I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again,” he said at the time.
Pitt also spoke to the New York Times about his sobriety in 2019 and described his experience after completing a 12-step program.
“You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself,” he said. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself.”
During the wide-ranging interview, Pitt also reflected on his life and recalled “one little period” where he felt he just “didn’t see a way out.”
“I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup,” he told Esquire. “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 – 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…
“This sh– ain’t easy and you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”
When asked about what he experienced, Pitt responded with, “family stuff” but did not elaborate.
