The most embarrassing audition of Brad Pitt’s career: “Have you ever thought about acting classes?”
It’s been a long time since Brad Pitt has had to worry about where his next paycheque was coming from, with the actor having comfortably resided among the Hollywood A-list for the last three decades.
Of course, a superstar rarely arrives fully formed and takes their place among the industry’s great and good at the beginning of their careers. Like many aspiring thespians looking for their big break, Pitt started off as a jobbing actor trying to scrape together whatever parts he could, although it helped somewhat that he was a ridiculously handsome lad.
To illustrate that point, look no further than the fact his feature debut came in a movie called Hunk, even if he went uncredited in the background. Even when he secured his first major leading role in 1988’s The Dark Side of the Sun by beating out hundreds of other auditionees, the film wasn’t released until 1997.
Rejection is part and parcel of the business, but some criticisms will sting more than most. Around the same time he was trying desperately to wedge his foot in the door, Pitt was dispatched by his representatives to see if he could wrangle himself a part in the legal drama that won Jodie Foster her first Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’.
“I got this agent, where they agreed to try me out in this thing called a side pocket,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “That means they’re not signing you to anything. They’re going to try it out for a month or two and see if it pays off. It was a fairly reputable agency, but they wanted me to do sitcoms. But I kept pushing: ‘Please send me out on some movies’. They sent me out for two. One was The Accused.”
He went in, read the lines, and waited patiently for the call to let him know if he was successful. He got it, but it came burdened with a crushing blow. “The agent wouldn’t get on the phone with me, but the assistant did,” he recalled. “I said, ‘How did it go?’ She said, ‘Have you ever thought about acting classes?'”
What made it worse was that not only had Pitt attended his fair share of acting classes, but he’d done so under the tutelage of Roy London, one of Los Angeles’ most esteemed teachers who’d worked with Sharon Stone, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Swayze, Geena Davis, and countless others when they were starting out.
Finding the positives, Pitt called it “the best thing I heard because it put me in a tailspin for about a half hour” before it made him “more determined to figure out what I had to learn.” Still, that kind of response would knock anybody’s confidence, especially when he was no stranger to acting classes at the time despite the casting assistant holding a different opinion.
