It would make sense for Brad Pitt to ramp up his smoking through the hectic and terrifying months of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Brad, 58, revealed in the new cover story for GQ that he gave up cigarettes during the lockdown. After offering GQ’s Ottessa Moshfegh a nicotine mint, Brad shared that he quit smoking over the past few years after realizing that cutting back on cigarettes wasn’t going to work. “I don’t have that ability to do just one or two a day,” he said. “It’s not in my makeup. I’m all in. And I’m going to drive into the ground. I’ve lost my privileges.”
This move follows Brad’s decision to get sober after his then-wife, Angelina Jolie, filed for divorce in September 2016. The Bullet Train star said he attended Alcoholics Anonymous to get a hold of his vices. “I had a really cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe,” he told GQ. “Because I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.”
Brad still sees the appeal in his old ways, telling Ottessa about the days he’d have a cigarette “in the morning, with the coffee—just delicious.” Pitt also spoke of the British painter David Hockney, one of the “indestructible types” (as Moshfegh puts it) who can handle that kind of lifestyle from coffin to grave. “He’s still chaining [chain-smoking], the hard-core English way. It looks great,” said Brad, revealing he’s met the artist on a couple of occasions. However, that’s not for Pitt. “I don’t think I have that,” he said. “I’m just at that age when nothing good comes from it.”
The world learned of Brad’s stint in AA in 2019. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he said in a September profile in The New York Times. It was the first time he spoke about his stint in AA. “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself. It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There’s great value in that.”
Brad also spoke about his sobriety with Sir Anthony Hopkins for Interview magazine. “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,” said Brad. “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.”
In 2017, Brad spoke with GQ Style and said he was six months sober. “I can’t remember a day since I got out of college where I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something,” he said. “You realize that a lot of it is, um- cigarettes, you know, pacifiers,” he adds. “And I’m running from feelings. I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that. I mean, I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know – things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem. And I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet.”