Schoony: Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch’s favourite artist
In April 2015, esteemed British actor Benedict Cumberbatch contributed an art piece by Tristan Schoonraad, also known as Schoony, to Consume, an exhibition at London’s Leontia Gallery. The piece was a sculpture of a young child holding a hand grenade with a combat helmet on his head. Reminiscent of an early U2 album cover, the sculpture was poignantly suggestive of political aversion and has attracted several famous names over the years, including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Damon Albarn.
According to gallery founder Leontia Reilly, these eminent celebrities of the music and film industries are all proud owners of one of Schoony’s so-called Boy Soldier sculptures. The pieces come in various sizes and materials, and with black glass models available online for just £100, you don’t need to be an A-lister or a business magnate to own one.
“Boy Soldier is such a powerful artwork that I think it really resonates with a lot of people, famous or not,” Leontia Reilly told Artnet News in 2015. “Schoony made the original standing sculpture back in 2008 and modelled it on his nephew, and when you look at it up close, it’s so full of detail. It’s very powerful and moving.”
As it transpires, Schoony, born in London in 1974, has his own ties to the Hollywood lifestyle. The artist learned his sculpting skills after following his father and brother into the prosthetics industry. Having learned to cast and mould life-size models of human body parts, he took it upon himself to create full-body sculptures as evocative art pieces. However, before his rise to fame as a sculptor, Schoony worked for several years in the US film industry as a special effects and make-up artist, working on hit movies such as Troy, Harry Potter and Gladiator.
As Reilly reported, Cumberbatch met Schoony on the set of the 2013 short film Little Favour, which featured Boy Soldier in one of its scenes. After the pair became well-acquainted, Cumberbatch asked Schoony to make a wall panel version of the sculpture, which he later purchased for £7,000.
“Benedict purchased it for the offices of his film production company, Sunny March,” Reilly added. “Schoony made an edition of five wall panels of Boy Soldier. We will be exhibiting Benedict’s own copy, but there are two more editions available if anyone is interested.”
Ostensibly inspired by the sculptor with whom he worked on the 2004 movie Troy, Brad Pitt took the craft into his own hands following his divorce from Jolie in the late 2010s. In 2022, Pitt exhibited the first fruit of his sculpting endeavours at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland.
Pitt had joined his friend, musician Nick Cave, in an artistic odyssey under the mentorship of Thomas Houseago, a famed British visual artist who specialises in sculpting. “For Nick [Cave] and I, this is a new world and our first entry,” Pitt told Finnish broadcaster Yle at the opening ceremony in September 2022. “It just feels right.”
“To me, it’s about self-reflection,” he continued. “It’s about where I have gotten it wrong in my relationships, where have I misstepped? Where am I complicit? For me, it was born out of ownership of what I call a radical inventory of self, getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt, moments I have just gotten wrong.” See some of Brad Pitt and Nick Cave’s work below, as well as Schoony’s Boy Soldier.
