Brad Pitt: The world’s greatest actor at eating in movies?
Plenty of actors have signature flourishes that they’ll find a way to incorporate into almost every movie they make, whether it’s Tom Cruise’s relentless desire to run as fast as he can, Sean Bean meeting his demise, Harrison Ford wondering where his family is, or Samuel L. Jackson deploying the word “motherfucker”. In the case of Brad Pitt, more often than not, you’ll find him very hungry.
It’s become a running joke at this point that Pitt is expected, if not obligated, to eat on-screen each time he has a new movie releasing. To that end, Insider made a point of noting that he’d been caught chowing down in at least 60 features across his career, which becomes all the more remarkable when that accounts for almost two-thirds of his filmography dating right back to his debut as the uncredited ‘Boy at the Beach’ in 1987’s fantasy comedy Hunk.
Offering his own thoughts on the recurring phenomenon, Pitt admitted it helped keep him occupied while he’s on set: “I like to busy myself, I’m a grazer by nature,” he revealed to Joe, explaining that it was actually an important part of his character in the Ocean’s franchise: “There was actually a method to that because Rusty was always on the run, always on the move, I figured he could never sit down and have a proper meal. So he always had to grab something on the run.”
Appraised in glowing terms by casting director Caroline Liem as “the Laurence Olivier of eating” to The Washington Post, his accuracy was commended in a profession where not everybody convincingly munches: “He makes it look like an actual human being eating, and you don’t get that a lot. He’s just one with food.”
It’s one thing to be constantly snacking on the big screen, but it’s an entirely different matter to have it actually mean anything in the long run besides people picking up on Pitt’s established trend for shovelling food into his mouth. To that end, a Reddit thread crunched the numbers – and the calories – to determine that the more his character eats, the more successful his movies tend to be.
The independent findings determined that “Brad Pitt movies featuring him consuming more than 200 on-screen calories have higher box office and critical/audience averages than his movie featuring zero eating or very little munching”.
While his outings that don’t involve eating average $68million at the domestic box office, those where he consumes up to 200 calories average $110m, but anything above that number sees another drastic increase to $143m. In addition, the highest average Rotten Tomatoes scores of his career come in productions when he takes in more than 200 calories, too, so there might just be a method behind the madness.
Innumerable talents have been captured on camera enjoying breakfast, lunch, dinner, or anything in between – and many of them have done it repeatedly over the course of decades – but few have turned it into an art form quite like Pitt, with a deep dive into his cinematic snack catalogue putting forth the notion that reviews and ticket sales actively increase the more he does it.
