There’s a kickass piece on Brad Pitt in this month’s W magazine, and really the whole thing’s worth a read, but he does discuss the firestorm that erupted when Jennifer Aniston stated that “what Angelina did was really uncool.”
Over the course of the next 90 minutes, Pitt proves to be unfailingly gracious, good-humored and game for all questions, including those about his life with Angelina Jolie and their brood of six, whom he refers to as “this cuckoo’s nest that we got going on over there.” He even responds to the latest installment of the Brad-Jen-Angelina saga. In November Jennifer Aniston told a journalist that an earlier comment from Jolie—that she and Pitt fell in love on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and so the film “might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe”—was “uncool,” because Aniston and Pitt were still married during filming. “Listen, man, Jen is a sweetheart,” Pitt says, as if to settle this thing once and for all. “I think she got dragged into that one, and then there’s a second round to all of that Angie versus Jen. It’s so created.” Of his current relationship with Aniston, he says, “We still check in with each other. She was a big part of my life, and me hers. I don’t see how there cannot be [that]. That’s life, man. That’s life.”
A few sentences into the next topic, though, Pitt circles back to defend Jolie’s honor. “What people don’t understand is that we filmed [Mr. & Mrs. Smith] for a year,” he explains. “We were still filming after Jen and I split up. Even then it doesn’t mean that there was some kind of dastardly affair. There wasn’t. I’m very proud of the way that it was handled. It was respectful. [The film] will mean something to our kids. It will, that’s all.”
And as for the photo shoot that accompanies this article?
Pitt requested that artist Chuck Close, known for his superdetailed daguerreotype portraits that reveal every skin flaw, shoot the pictures accompanying this story. Pitt has always been a master of using press images to convey messages about his life, as when he and photographer Steven Klein created a provocative shoot in this magazine that depicted him and Jolie as a Fifties-era married couple with kids—before they had publicly acknowledged their love affair. Close suggests that the actor, who showed “no vanity” during the sitting, is once again playing with public perception.
“You can’t be the fair-haired young boy forever,” says Close. “At some point he’ll have to become some sort of character actor. Maybe a photograph of him with his crow’s-feet and furrowed brow is good for him. It humanizes him. It makes him less of a cinema god and more of a person.”
