Category: BP Press

LA Times

“I swear to God, I had to hide a tear,” Brad Pitt says, looking over at Quentin Tarantino and Leonardo DiCaprio, remembering the first time Tarantino played him the José Feliciano cover of “California Dreamin’” on the set of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” “Look,” Pitt continues. “I’m not ashamed to say it. I got a little misty.”

We’ve settled onto a couple of sofas inside a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont because … where else would we meet to talk about Tarantino’s wistful elegy to a bygone Hollywood? As the song declares, it’s a winter’s day, though the (palm tree) leaves are green, not brown, and the sun setting just beyond the swimming pool is making the sky periwinkle blue, not a dismal gray.

But otherwise, yeah, we’re California dreamin’, sitting back, talking about a movie that earned 10 Oscar nominations — three for Tarantino as a director, writer and producer, and acting nods for DiCaprio and Pitt — and also considering the good fortune that has graced their lives over the last few decades.

“You know, when I first moved out here, it was the summer of ’86 and I didn’t know [expletive]-all about Los Angeles, other than what I’d seen on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and ‘Dragnet,’” Pitt says. “I landed in Burbank at a house I could crash at for a month or so. It was just me and a maid from Thailand who couldn’t speak English. Man, I was just so up for the adventure, and so excited when I’d drive by a studio where they make movies. It meant the world to me.”

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New Europe interview

Fresh off his Golden Globes win for his role in Quenin Tarantino’s film. Once Upon a time in Hollywood, iconic America actor Brad Pitt sat down with New Europe’s Federico Grandesso while the latter was in Venice to promote the science fiction film Ad Astra, his most, and a collaboration with director James Gray.

NEW EUROPE (NE): What’s your feeling about the major success of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

BRAD PITT (BP): Well, that the movie was well-received by the critics and audiences alike, and has made a huge earning at the US box office, was expected. I think it’s great. It’s big for a Quentin film that it could still land like that. I think it was the only original content released over last summer that is neither a sequel nor based on a comic book or something like that. So, it’s no small feat. It says a lot that the studios can still gamble on films like his. I’m really pleased for it because the film was well-suited to my taste, of course.

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Brad Pitt, Chris Evans, Laura Dern and Six Other Stars Grace the Covers of W’s Best Performances 2020 Issue

For the Best Performances 2020 issue, the stars of the biggest films of the past year posed for photographer Juergen Teller in the most quintessential of Los Angeles locales: strip malls, parking lots and hotel rooms. This time around, the annual portfolio features nine different covers, with Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and Ad Astra), Joaquin Phoenix (Joker), Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers), Eddie Murphy (Dolemite Is My Name), Chris Evans (Knives Out and Avengers: Endgame), Laura Dern (Marriage Story and Little Women), Adam Driver (Marriage Story, The Report, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems) and Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit) at their bold, unvarnished, effervescent best. For the portfolio inside the issue, the actors sat down with W’s Editor at Large Lynn Hirschberg to discuss their lives and work: Dern reflects on her public perception (she’s never felt like an icon), Lopez recalls her early days as a dancer, and Murphy opens up about the films and comedy albums that influenced him as a kid. Here, all of Teller’s iconic covers for W’s first issue of the new decade, and its tenth edition of Best Performances.

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Be sure to read Brad’s hilarious (in my opinion) short interview right here.

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The Magic Behind the ‘Great Performers’ Issue

Jack Davison’s photographs capture this year’s best actors with a minimalist and inventive approach.

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Released in December, just before awards season, the Great Performers Issue is one of The New York Times Magazine’s most anticipated of the year. After watching many hours of movies released in 2019, The Times’s co-chief film critic A.O. Scott and critic-at-large Wesley Morris narrowed down their choices for most striking performances in film this year to 10 actors: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez, Elisabeth Moss, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lupita Nyong’o, Julianne Moore, Antonio Banderas and Robert De Niro. All 10 appear in this weekend’s issue of the magazine.

“You have to kind of read the room,” Mr. Davison said. Some actors asked questions and wanted to collaborate; others wanted him to do his thing. Mr. Pitt, for one, “was quite interested in what the materials did when I was shooting through them,” Mr. Davison recalled. Mr. Banderas even got playful. All told, Mr. Davison spent two days shooting in Los Angeles, two more in New York and one in Spain (to shoot Mr. Banderas).

Read more. Bigger version picture at the BP Gallery.

New York Times

As the stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Brad Pitt laid down a performance of vintage Hollywood dudeness. His character is equally at ease being a human security blanket for his B-list-actor boss, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, as he is subduing murderous Manson family members while tripping on acid. In James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” Pitt used the same tools he wielded so deftly in Tarantino’s film — laconic cool; understated emotion — to build an entirely different version of masculinity. In it, he’s Roy McBride, an astronaut on an interplanetary mission to find his absentee (in multiple senses of the word) father. But McBride’s imperturbability is rooted in repression and hurt, nothing like Booth’s so-it-goes acceptance. “The two characters could be connected,” Pitt says, “in the sense that you have to go through an evolution to get to a place of comfort. You have to go through profound internal hardships.”

Read more. Thanks Shann!

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Interview

Brad interviews Anthony Hopkins!

After well over a hundred starring roles, in a career stretching back to the 1960s, it’s a wonder Hollywood hasn’t run out of meaty, memorable archetypes for Sir Anthony Hopkins to portray. In the past, the 81-year-old Welsh Oscar winner has played more than his share of deviously brilliant psychotic murderers (The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, Fracture); restrained, restricted Englishmen on the brink of emotional crises (Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Shadowlands, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger); iconic artistic geniuses who defined the 20th century (Surviving Picasso, Hitchcock); and more Shakespeare characters than should be expected of anyone (Hamlet, King Lear, Titus). Not to mention the other gods of celluloid he has traded dialogue with over the years (his third movie role had him starring opposite Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in 1968’s The Lion in Winter).

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Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler Have an Unlikely Movie Bromance

Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Ad Astra”) and Adam Sandler (“Uncut Gems”) sat down for a chat for “Variety Studio: Actors on Actors.”

As has become a tradition for Variety’s Actors on Actors conversations, two superstars realize they have even more in common than celebrity. The careers of Brad Pitt and Adam Sandler ran on parallel tracks after they arrived in Hollywood in the late 1980s, emerging among the last generation of A-list superstars in the ’90s through wildly different genres of film. Sandler made hits of raucous comedies like “Happy Gilmore” and “The Waterboy,” while Pitt burnished a character-actor reputation with turns in “12 Monkeys” and “Fight Club.” This past year, Pitt was as melancholic as he’s ever been in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” while Sandler was characteristically outsized in the New York freakout “Uncut Gems.” And yet, during a lengthy exchange, they keep stumbling over what unites them as artists.

“What I love when we started were cables everywhere, and massive lights,” Pitt tells Sandler, reminiscing about their early days in movies. “You’d be sweating all the time, and big-ass cameras that were super loud. Now it’s getting down to, we’re almost sitting in our own room in the dark. It’s a whole ’nother thing.”

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USA Today

WASHINGTON – Brad Pitt leans back and relaxes in a Georgetown hotel chair a mile and a half from the White House, though he’s light-years away from worrying about presidential tweets.

It’s been three days since the 55-year-old actor told a French newspaper that President Donald Trump represented a “much bigger threat” on “more serious issues” than tariffs on the French vineyard Pitt owns with ex-wife Angelina Jolie.

No angry social-media missives have been thrown his way yet, though, and “truthfully, I don’t even think about it. It probably says I’m doing something wrong,” says Pitt, brandishing his signature grin.

This mind-set is in line with the overall Tao of Brad: The star of the space adventure “Ad Astra” (in theaters Friday) is self-effacing and thoughtful, kind and cool, philosophical yet also guarded.

In recent years in the public eye, Pitt has navigated a two-year divorce and got sober. He’s also found two of his most memorable characters onscreen: The enigmatic and easygoing 1960s stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” – which has Pitt in line for his fourth Oscar acting nomination – and stoic, introspective “Ad Astra” astronaut Roy McBride, who blasts off into the cosmos seeking his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones).

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Entertainment Weekly

Brad Pitt has a great laugh: a sort of staccato, slow-rolling ah-huh-huh-huh that makes you think of surfers and cowboys and movie stars. He uses it more than once to excellent effect as Cliff Booth, the laconic stuntman-cum-sidekick who stumbles into the dark heart of the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s showbiz Babylon Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and not at all in the lonely-astronaut epic Ad Astra (out Sept. 20), though it often punctuates his conversation with EW about both those roles.

To say that one of the world’s most beloved and best-known celebrities is having a moment 30-plus years into his career feels, at this point, pretty much indisputable. But don’t call it a comeback, or a Brad-aissance; several times over the course of a friendly, sometimes philosophical interview he’ll insist that his only goal is “putting stories out into the world” — which in 2019 means not just starring in a pair of films that may well end up dominating the coming awards season but also continuing to head up Plan B Entertainment, the boutique production company responsible for a vanguard slate of films, including Vice, Moonlight, Beautiful Boy, and 12 Years a Slave.

That laugh comes tumbling out again when he’s asked to find the thread between Hollywood’s Cliff, a sort of beach-boy Lebowski with a singular gift for sudden violence, and Ad Astra’s Maj. Roy McBride, an almost pathologically contained spaceman on a solo mission to Mars. “Well, Cliff is by far a much easier way to live, and certainly I would say what we’re all striving for,” he says, chuckling. “But to get to Cliff’s peace of mind and acceptance in the day, you’d probably have to go through Roy’s dilemma to get there.”

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Manila Times

TOKYO: Even though he was dressed ruggedly from head to toe — his newspaper boy hat down to the worn out shoes — Brad Pitt couldn’t get any dreamier at age 55.

To be sure, his entrance was still grand even with such a regular look, driving home the fact that we were about to have a chat Hollywood’s undisputed golden boy.

Doing press for his new movie “Ad Astra,” which he co-produces with 20th Century Fox, what we loved about interviewing Brad is how his gorgeous looks equally match his wit. He is profound and sensible at the same time, not only when choosing his movie projects but in his overall outlook in life.

We were lucky because even if he was absolutely jet-lagged from flying all around the world, his mood was also a hundred percent playful and engaged.

From the one-on-one interview to the red carpet, he was just —well — golden indeed. In fact, he even called out our name during the premiere. “MJ!” You can imagine just how giddy we were!

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New York Times

“Faster alone, further together,” Brad Pitt murmured. Over his left shoulder hung Mars, reddish-brown and heartbreakingly small, while to his right, the much grander Jupiter was lit up like a disco ball.

We were seated opposite each other on the lowest level of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, inhabiting a closed-off exhibition called “Depths of Space,” mulling stoic men. Pitt has played his fair share of them in the movies, including two characters just this year: Cliff Booth, the bemused stunt man who sauntered through the summer hit “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and Roy McBride, an astronaut shuttled to lonelier, ever more remote outposts of the galaxy in the coming “Ad Astra.”

Movie stars have their specialties, and while Pitt has proved that he can play a motormouth in films like “12 Monkeys” and “Snatch,” he’s at his most alluring when he’s holding something in reserve. It feels like you’re watching a man who says no more than he needs to, which is a major feat for someone who has starred in two films from the notoriously loquacious Quentin Tarantino.

“I grew up with that be-capable, be-strong, don’t-show-weakness thing,” Pitt told me. He was raised in Springfield, Mo., the eldest of three children, his father the owner of a trucking company. Now, at 55, he’s reached a point where he sees his dad in every performance he gives. “In some ways, I’m copying him,” Pitt said. “He had grown up in extreme hardship and poverty, always dead set on giving me a better life than he had — and he did it. But he came from that stoic ilk.”

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