Brad Pitt is finally speaking openly about a chapter of his life that, until now, has mostly lived in headlines and court filings. In a recent conversation on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, the actor peeled back the curtain on his first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting — a moment that came during the emotional wreckage of his divorce from Angelina Jolie.
“I needed rebooting,” Pitt, 61, confessed. “I needed to wake the fuck up in some areas.” After years of keeping his struggles private, the Oscar winner’s candidness surprised even Shepard, 50, who recalled the surreal experience of having Pitt in the room. “A bazillion famous people” had attended that same meeting, Shepard said, but none had the overwhelming presence of Pitt.
“You were so fucking honest,” Shepard told him. “I was like, he must have a stubbornness like I have, which is like, ‘Yeah, all this is going on, but I refuse to let it not let me be a person.’” Pitt admitted he hadn’t viewed it that way; instead, he described himself as broken and desperate. “I was pretty much on my back, on my knees,” he said. “I was really open to… I was trying anything that anyone threw at me. It was a particularly difficult time.”
Though he was nervous at first, the actor said the room’s raw honesty helped him push past his fear. “Everyone was so open, it gave me permission in a way to go, ‘OK, I’m going to step out on this edge and see what happens.’ Then I just really grew to love it.” The experience, Pitt added, stood in stark contrast to his upbringing in Missouri’s Ozarks, where emotional suppression was the norm and “everything’s great” was a default response to pain.
Pitt’s battle with alcohol was thrust into the spotlight following a now-infamous altercation on a private jet in 2016, which reportedly contributed to the collapse of his marriage. Legal filings during the divorce claimed that he had assaulted Jolie and two of their children during the flight. Both the FBI and the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services investigated, ultimately deciding not to pursue charges.
