Inspirations to be emulated: the actors who blew Brad Pitt away
While it’s an incredibly first-world concern in the grand scheme of things, one of the biggest issues that faced Brad Pitt during his rise up the Hollywood ladder was the fact that he was a ridiculously handsome man.
Woe betides him, the aspiring actor was so damned beautiful to look at that nobody seemed all that interested in taking him particularly seriously as a performer, which presented its own set of drawbacks. One of the most recurring labels slapped onto Pitt was that he was a character actor cursed with a leading man’s face, but the easiest way to alter those perceptions was to take control of his own destiny.
Once he gained a foothold in the A-list and had his pick of the parts, Pitt was able to take on the very roles that eluded him during his formative years. Of course, he’s played his fair share of chiselled and charming sorts, but he’s always been at his best when he’s allowed to tap into a complicated character that pushes him to heights he’d never encountered before.
These days, Pitt’s credentials aren’t in doubt, and they haven’t been for a long time. He’s an Academy Award, Bafta, and Golden Globe winner in front of the camera and every bit as successful behind it. In the mid-1980s, though, all of those accolades would have been a distant pipedream for a youngster who was largely finding work because they were about as telegenic as they come.
In 1987, Pitt guest starred on smash hit small screen drama Dallas in a four-episode arc as Randy, in what was comfortably the biggest gig of his professional life thus far. In an interview with teen-centric magazine Tiger Beat, the actors he named as being his favourites and the ones he sought to emulate made for fascinating reading.
“Jack Nicholson is up there,” he said. “I love Mickey Rourke; he blows my mind. I love Sean Penn, even with the bad press he gets. When he’s on-screen, I admire him. I like Timothy Hutton, too. I’ve never really gotten into the classics, which I’ve been trying to learn about lately. Marlon Brando blows me away. The minute he came on the screen in A Streetcar Named Desire; woooo!”
Eliminating Nicholson and Brando from the equation because they’re one-of-a-kind legends, it can be argued that Pitt has eclipsed all of the others he named. Whereas Pitt became known for his pretty face before his acting chops came to the fore and gained genuine appreciation, Rourke set the benchmark for how to turn both into a potent weapon before pissing it all away.
He carried himself with a dangerous charisma that earned him early Brando comparisons, with Rourke both easy on the eye and supremely gifted before he hit the self-destruct button. Hutton won an Oscar in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People when he was only 20 years old, but he never hit those heights again. Penn has the exact same number of Oscars as Pitt does, but he never managed to puncture the mainstream in quite the same way.
Pitt was only 22 when he passed judgement on the actors that blew him away, and with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, he’s definitely – and comfortably – surpassed Rourke and Hutton, and he’s a bigger star than Penn ever was. Nicholson and Brando remain untouchable, obviously, but he’s done alright nonetheless.
