The Many Revolutions of Brad Pitt (The Hollywood Reporter)

The superstar with multiple Oscar nominations has everything: a brilliant career, a partner he wants to marry and, in “Moneyball,” a seeming disaster he turned into a masterpiece. Still, Hollywood’s producer-actor confesses to earlier bouts of depression and a relentless need to question just about everything (himself included): “This idea of perpetual happiness is crazy and overrated.”

Try to set up an interview with Brad Pitt, and you instantly plunge into his almost Dada-esque world.

After all, where do you go? A restaurant rendez­vous would devolve into a scrum of gawkers and gapers; his suggestion that we meet at this reporter’s office creates such a stir among jaded journalists, it is rapidly nixed; and Pitt’s house in the Hollywood Hills is apparently out of bounds, reserved for his partner, Angelina Jolie, and their six kids — and those inquiring minds eager to know about a decapitated head found nearby only days before.

So it is, like participants in the witness protection program, that we find ourselves ensconced in a 14th-floor suite at Hollywood’s W Hotel this Jan. 20 — chosen because Pitt’s Cadillac Escalade can make a quick in-and-out to avoid the paparazzi thirsting to behold him.

Pitt doesn’t blame them. Media reports surfaced hours earlier that police had interviewed his bodyguard about human limbs scattered near the Hollywood sign. Still, he can’t help being bemused. “I was watching CNN, and they said, ‘Brad Pitt’s home!’ and, ‘Brad Pitt’s bodyguard!’ “ he laughs in disbelief. “I’m like: ‘Why? Why?’ “

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• x008 The Hollywood Reporter (Outtakes).

And the ‘behind the scenes’ of the cover photoshoot: