How Brad Pitt found the positives in his atrocious slasher movie: “The mistakes are documented”
Horror has long been a proving ground for aspiring actors and directors, many of whom, including Brad Pitt, have overcome their embarrassing early detours to become the biggest names in the business.
Nobody remembers Charlize Theron as the star who debuted and was overdubbed in a Children of the Corn sequel, just like George Clooney always has Batman & Robin to fall back on, so that nobody points to Grizzly II, Return to Horror High, or Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes as the worst entries in his filmography.
Even though he’s been one of the industry’s most in-demand leading men for three decades, Pitt’s first main roles were hardly memorable. His first time taking top billing in 1987’s The Dark Side of the Sun wasn’t even released for almost a decade, and the actor joked that part of the reason why it spent so long on the shelf was because it was “lacking in entertainment value”, which is true.
Like many before and after him, Pitt was lured into the arena of low-budget slasher fare by the promise of significant screentime, which is about the only front his turn as Dwight Ingalls in 1989’s Cutting Class delivered. Formulaic to a fault, the narrative follows the tried-and-trusted tropes of the subgenre.
A student recently released from a psychiatric institution finds himself caught in a burgeoning love triangle with the resident popular girl and her current boyfriend, played by Pitt. Naturally, their peers start disappearing and dying in mysterious ways, but that’s beside the point when nobody cares. As far as slashers go, Cutting Class would have been forgotten long ago if it weren’t for its future superstar.
Instead of sweeping it under the rug, though, he saw it as a source of inspiration. Not for him, right enough, but for any jobbing thespian who dreams of becoming the next Brad Pitt. There was a hint of ego about it, but the eventual Academy Award winner explained to Gene Siskel that if he could survive a bargain basement horror flick and become an A-lister, so could anyone else.
“All the mistakes are documented on film,” he said, referring to his early roles. “Listen, if anyone does want to get started and they lose faith one day, all they’ve gotta do is watch one of the things I hopped on in the beginning.”
To illustrate his point, Pitt brought up Cutting Class, which he understatedly described as “bad”.
“It’s a testament that you can learn anything you want to do,” he offered, which in his case was how to act. Some household names, like Critters 3 alum Leonardo DiCaprio and Leperchaun‘s Jennifer Aniston, pretend as though their early forays into horror don’t exist, which is one way of coping with a permanent blight on a professional life.
Pitt, on the other hand, saw Cutting Class as a source of potential inspiration for the next generation: he was in a wretched film early on, and it didn’t stop him from becoming Brad fucking Pitt, which should be enough to offer encouragement to any actor who gets dragged into a farcical horror right out of the gate.
