Brad Pitt is off the wagon.
The Hollywood heartthrob, who had spoken publicly about his sobriety as recently as last year, made the admission in an Esquire cover story after he offered the writer a glass of wine. The surprising revelation caught many off guard given Pitt’s concerning history with alcohol and led to questions about his overall well-being.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Maureen Callahan, host of MK Media’s The Nerve, to discuss Pitt’s return to the bottle and what the timing of his admission may signal.
‘Off the Wagon’
In the feature published August 10, Esquire writer Ryan D’Agostino recounted Pitt offering him wine during a sit-down at his sprawling Los Angeles home where the actor assembled a charcuterie board for them to snack on.
D’Agostino wrote that he asked the 62 year old “if the wine is something for guests,” to which Pitt told him he “got back off the wagon” after seven years sober.
“No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon,” Pitt told D’Agostino with what he described as a “little laugh.”
The actor then clarified that his drinking is “more restrained” these days. “I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”
“You can have a glass of wine,” D’Agostino responded.
“Yeah. Well… I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it,” Pitt said, adding, in D’Agostino’s telling, that he “likes mornings now anyway, and you can miss a lovely morning when you drink too much the night before, and it’s just not as interesting.”
Pitt’s Past
The Esquire piece noted that Pitt publicly thanked fellow actor Bradley Cooper at an awards ceremony in 2020 for helping him get sober and talked more deeply about his sobriety on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard last June.
The Hollywood Reporter found earlier examples of Pitt talking about his issues with alcohol, including a 2017 GQ interview in which he admitted he couldn’t remember a day since leaving college when he wasn’t drinking, smoking pot, or abusing another substance. The actor, who owns a winery, also nodded to his overconsumption of the beverage.
“I mean, we have a winery. I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground. I had to step away for a minute,” he said at the time.
In 2019, Pitt told The New York Times he spent 18 months in an all-male Alcoholics Anonymous recovery group. And then came the 2020 acknowledgment of Cooper and more recent discussion with Shepard.
The Fight Club star’s sobriety journey appeared to follow an alarming 2016 incident in which his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, accused him of assaulting her and at least two of their children during a flight on a private plane. In a court filing, Jolie included photos of injuries she said she sustained and said she had seen Pitt have two to three drinks.
Damage Control?
On Monday, Page Six reported Pitt was seen drinking at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding in July before publicly admitting he is off the wagon. A source told the outlet at the time that guests were shocked to see the Ocean’s Eleven actor, who attended the nuptials with girlfriend Ines de Ramon, drinking at the high-profile event.
Megyn said she finds the reports concerning. “I’m worried about him… If you’re an alcoholic, I’m pretty sure this is not how it works and I think… there are probably not a lot of people in Brad Pitt’s life who can sit him down and say, ‘Brad, no, for an alcoholic, what is it? One drink is too many, and 1,000 won’t be enough,'” she noted.
What struck Callahan about the revelation is how Pitt himself orchestrated it. “Brad Pitt designed that tableau in order to get this story out, right? He was the one who brought out the wine and served it to the journalist… It’s a cover story in Esquire. He knows it’s going to make headlines, right? So why, why is he telling us this,” she wondered.
Callahan suggested it could be a situation of trying to break news before making it. “My question is: Are we trying to get ahead of something? Because back when Angie deplaned with those children, fled in a limousine in 2016, and, the next day, filed for divorce… Brad, a couple of months later, does a cover story for GQ, in which he says, ‘Hey, I’m an alcoholic, I’m an AA now, and I really had to get my stuff together,'” she recalled.
The GQ profile, Callahan noted, came out ahead the troubling details of what happened on the flight became public. “I was working at The New York Post… [and] I remember saying to this guy who was one of the top reporters on Page Six… ‘There are plenty of people in recovery in Hollywood that we don’t know about, so why is he being so public about this?’… and Ian said to me, ‘I think he’s trying to get ahead of something.’ Lo and behold, we later learned what went down on that plane,” she recounted.
“When Brad Pitt – who has been famous for the bulk of his adult life and who knows how the machine works – does [something like] this [Esquire admission], I raise an eyebrow,” Callahan said.
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Callahan by tuning in to episode 1,379 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.