David Fincher explains the parallels between Paul Newman and Brad Pitt: “Wow, who knew?”
One of the most enduring icons in Hollywood history, Paul Newman is someone every leading man would want to hear themselves compared to. Rising to prominence in the 1950s, Newman achieved stratospheric fame with 1958’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof alongside Elizabeth Taylor, riding high into a string of box office hits, awards and critical warmth in the proceeding decade.
It’s easy to see why a megastar like Brad Pitt would enter the frame next to him – both sporting chiselled good looks that mesmerise in almost any role. However, in a comparison director David Fincher made between the two, the parallel is more than skin-deep.
While far from his first, Pitt’s immortalisation as a sex symbol began with a small role in Thelma & Louise. Pitt has a sex scene with Geen Davis’ lead character that is fleeting but extremely memorable for his honed physique and oozing charisma. Pitt was somewhat typecast as pretty-faced red flags from there, going on to play serial killers, stoner layabouts and weepy vampires throughout the 1990s. This culminated in the reddest flag of all: Tyler Durden in Fincher’s Fight Club, where his charm is weaponised as an unnerving but alluring mania festering in Edward Norton’s character’s mind.
Reviewers often couldn’t help but point out his looks even if they weren’t pertinent to the roles he chose, making them seem too distracting for an actor who wanted to be taken seriously. (Hot and talented? Poor Brad…) Newman faced similar hurdles, best remembered for the heroic characters he played in classics like Cool Hand Luke and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid that audiences preferred associating with his blonde-haired, blue-eyed charms than the less likeable ones.
Early in his career, critics were quick to lump Newman in with Marlon Brando and James Dean as part of an indistinguishable ‘pretty boy’ pack, even insinuating Newman succeeded simply by filling an attractive Dean-shaped hole after the latter’s death. As Newman aged, he pushed himself into more unsavoury parts in the late 1970s and early 1980s and may have had the bravery to do so more often when he was younger if fixations on his appearance hadn’t been so prevalent.
As he aged out of his boyishness, Pitt similarly let himself ‘go’ more as a performer. In 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he shed his usual exterior entirely to slip into the skin of a man ageing in reverse. In the Cohen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, released the same year, he pokes fun at his himbo reputation by playing an airheaded gym rat.
Its creative limitations stem from Pitt and Newman’s public images, which Fincher highlights in a 2009 interview with Film Comment: “Once everyone gets over the endless bizarre fascination that the tabloids have with [Brad Pitt]… it’s kind of like Paul Newman—you’re just amazingly handsome, amazingly handsome, amazingly handsome until you have a body of 20 or 30 movies, and then everyone goes, Wow, who knew.”
Nothing is more full-circle for Pitt, then, than his hilariously short-lived role in 2022’s The Lost City. “Why are you so attractive?” Sandra Bullock’s character asks as he heroically rescues her. “My father was a weatherman,” he quips.
