Brad Pitt doesn’t want to “Cry Macho” like Clint Eastwood off-camera.
The Oscar winner opened up about the “exhausting” pressure to perform the iconography of masculinity as represented onscreen.
“It’s just exhausting to be anything but who you are,” the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” alum told the Financial Times. “You have to understand, at least where I grew up, we’re more the Clint Eastwood character: you hold everything within, you’re capable, you can deal with anything, you don’t show weakness. I see that in my dad and the older generations of actors, and, man, it’s exhausting.”
Pitt continued, “As I get older, I find such a comfort in friendships where you can be [completely yourself], and I want that to extend in the outer world. What people make of it: I’m fine. I feel safe here because there’s a focus on our struggles as human beings, because it’s fraught with peril. And joy as well.”
The “Bullet Train” star made headlines earlier this year for wearing a skirt to the premiere of the David Leitch-helmed action film. “We’re all going to die, so let’s mess it up,” Pitt said at the time (via Variety).
Pitt, along with musician Nick Cave and Los Angeles-based artist Thomas Houseago, exhibited a sculpture collection at Finnish art museum Sara Hildén. “I find I have to walk with the pain I experience, and I have to walk with the joy, the beauty,” Pitt said. “Our mutual misery became comic, and out of this misery came a flame of joy in my life. I always wanted to be a sculptor; I’d always wanted to try it.”
Pitt, billed as a “largely self-taught” artist, explained his pieces are part of his emotional rebirth.
“I was looking at my own life and really concentrating on owning my own shit: where was I complicit in failures in my relationships, where have I misstepped,” the “Blonde” and “She Said” producer said. “For me, it was born out of ownership of what I call a radical inventory of self, getting really brutally honest with me, and taking account of those I may have hurt.”
Pitt currently is in multiple lawsuits with former partner Angelina Jolie six years after Jolie filed for divorce. As reported by The New York Times, the legal filing claims Pitt physically assaulted both Jolie and their children during a plane ride in September 2016. Pitt previously told The New York Times in 2019 that following Jolie filing for divorce, he went to Alcoholics Anonymous and is now sober.
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