How a stripper helped Brad Pitt become a Hollywood legend: “It’s good enough for me”
The life of an aspiring actor can often be difficult, and Brad Pitt had no clue how he was supposed to get his foot in the door when he first started out.
Born in Oklahoma and attending university in Missouri, the future superstar ventured to Los Angeles with bright eyes and a bushy tail, hoping to achieve his dream. One of the first problems he encountered, which was admittedly a major one, was that he didn’t have any idea how actors are supposed to get started.
He was in his early 20s, he had no connections, and he barely had two pennies to rub together. Like many would-be thespians, Pitt began taking on an assortment of odd jobs just to keep his head above water, including dressing in a chicken costume to entice customers into a local fast food spot.
Sharing an apartment with eight other people and working thankless gigs just to scrape by, it was an almost stereotypical introduction to Hollywood. Pitt did at least manage to wrangle his way onto several sets as an extra, but it goes without saying his aspirations were a lot greater than lurking in the background.
His first credited roles came in 1987, when Pitt appeared in five TV shows in quick succession, most notably a four-episode guest stint on the smash hit drama Dallas. He’d finally made it onto the bottom rung of the ladder, which may not have even happened if it wasn’t for a timely intervention from a stripper.
As one of his many side hustles, Pitt drove strippers around the city, transporting them from place to place. He ended up quitting after two months, but on his very last night as a chauffeur for the scantily clad, one of the dancers helped alter the trajectory of his entire life.
“On the last night I drove, one of the new strippers told me about an acting class that her friend Charlie Sheen went to,” he told Karen Bystedt. “I figured, if it’s good enough for Charlie, it’s good enough for me.” The class was taught by Roy London, and in no time at all, Pitt had caught his biggest break yet.
During those classes, he worked with an actor who had an audition lined up with a major talent agency, but it was Pitt who ended up getting signed once they’d performed their scene in front of the representatives. Once he captured attention on the big screen for the first time in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise in 1989, he was off to the races.
These days, Pitt is comfortably settled as one of the biggest and highest-paid stars in town with Academy Awards to his name for acting and producing, but it was a stripper who inadvertently set him on his way when she convinced him to sign up for his first acting class in Los Angeles.
