Brad Pitt gets candid about his flaws in a new interview — explaining, for one, how he loses his cool from time to time.
As Pitt, 55, chats with his former Legends of the Fall costar Anthony Hopkins for Interview magazine, Hopkins calls him “as easygoing as ever.”
“Pretty much, it’s my gliding speed,” Pitt responds. “But I lose it at times. I get sucked into something, and I can lose it. I take my hands off the wheel. … I’m human.”
Pitt didn’t provide any examples during the interview, but he allegedly had an altercation with son Maddox, 18, in September 2016, after which Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from the Ad Astra actor. During their marriage, Pitt and Jolie, 44 — who also share Pax, 16, Zahara, 14, Shiloh, 13, Vivienne, 11, and Knox, 11 — would have “heated, screaming fights,” a source previously told Us Weekly.
In his conversation with Hopkins, 81, Pitt opens up about turning mistakes into lessons. “I’m realizing, as a real act of forgiveness for myself for all the choices that I’ve made that I’m not proud of, that I value those missteps, because they led to some wisdom, which led to something else,” he says. “You can’t have one without the other. I see it as something I’m just now getting my arms around at this time in my life. But I certainly don’t feel like I can take credit for any of it.”
He also discusses atonement during the interview: “We’ve always placed great importance on the mistake. But the next move, what you do after the mistake, is what really defines a person. We’re all going to make mistakes. But what is that next step? We don’t, as a culture, seem to stick around to see what that person’s next step is. And that’s the part I find so much more invigorating and interesting.”
Pitt previously talked about regrets in a segment on NPR’s Weekend Edition in September. “It seems universal that we all carry great pains, great feelings of loneliness and regrets,” he said at the time. “I had a friend who worked in a hospice and he said: The only thing that people talk about is their loves and then their regrets in love, dealing with love. I thought: Man, that’s really interesting. If that’s our focus on the way out, better start working on that now.”
