New Delhi: Brad Pitt has revealed that he broke his sobriety after staying alcohol-free for seven years, saying he eventually “got back off the wagon” but has since learned to drink moderately.
“I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon,” Pitt said in an interview with Esquire on Monday.
He clarified that his relapse was relatively controlled, and that he became “overconfident” a couple of times before realising alcohol was still not good for him. That said, he still doesn’t consume alcohol in large quantities and has only “a few glasses of wine.”
“I have to be professional about it,” he said.
During the interview, Pitt also opened up about a darker period in his life, where he felt “suicidal” while dealing with the “family stuff.”
“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,” the actor said.
Pitt’s drinking became a major point of discussion following an alleged 2016 drunken plane incident, which has been linked to the breakdown of his marriage to actor Angelina Jolie.
Jolie later alleged in court documents that Pitt had physically harmed her and one of their six children. The former couple, who starred together in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), were declared legally separated in 2019 and finalised their divorce settlement in 2024.
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A long struggle
Pitt first spoke publicly about his sobriety in a 2019 The New York Times interview. At the time, he revealed that he had joined a 12-step programme.
“I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privilege,” he had said.
A year ago, Pitt also opened up about his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. Recalling the experience, the actor said he was “pretty much on knees.”
“I was trying anything and everything, anything anyone threw at me. … It was a difficult time. I needed rebooting,” he told Shepard.
Pitt admitted that he initially found the idea of speaking during the AA meetings daunting, particularly as his turn approached. But watching others speak openly about their experiences eventually gave him the confidence to do the same.
“It gives you permission to go, ‘OK, I’m gonna step out on this edge and see what happens.’ And then I really grew to love it,” he recalled.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)