The role Brad Pitt wants to delete from history: “It was lacking in entertainment value”
Like most aspiring actors, Brad Pitt had to bide his time before becoming a star. Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise may have been released less than four years after his uncredited feature debut in 1987’s Hunk, but it was still the ninth film of his career.
Of course, it worked in the actor’s favour that he was ridiculously handsome, and the attention generated from his brief appearance as JD in the Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis classic quickly grew into an albatross around his neck. Pitt wanted to be taken seriously as a performer, but it was both a blessing and a curse that he was also a very good-looking guy.
To combat that, he deliberately played against type as a stoned slacker in Tony Scott’s True Romance and a serial killer in Kalifornia, but it wasn’t until his first Academy Award-nominated performance in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys that people finally sat up, took notice, and realised that he was a genuinely talented performer capable of disappearing into a role.
The first time Pitt received top billing in a theatrically released film was 1991’s Johnny Suede, but it wasn’t his first starring role. In fact, the actor’s first headline credit came in the first year of his career, even if it would be another decade before anyone could see it.
Heading off to Europe to shoot The Dark Side of the Sun in what was then Yugoslavia, Pitt played Rick Clayton, an American with a rare skin condition that prevents him from being exposed to direct sunlight who falls in love and decides to focus on living his life at the expense of his illness.
After wrapping production, The Dark Side of the Sun was almost lost to the sands of time. With conflicts raging throughout the region, the footage was locked away in a Belgrade warehouse until late 1996, when producer Andjelo Arandjelovic stepped into the breach, dragged it over the finish line, secured a distribution deal, and finally got it released on home video the following year.
When asked about it by Entertainment Weekly, Pitt suggested that socio-political turmoil may not have been the only reason it was kept from the public. “I don’t think it was shelved because of that,” he said. “I think it was shelved because it was lacking in entertainment value.”
The two-time Academy Award winner clearly remembers the experience vividly because when it was brought to his attention that he did, in fact, play a character called Nick, he couldn’t remember. “I couldn’t tell you,” he admitted. “It was a Yugoslavian production when there was a Yugoslavia.”
It may have been lacking in entertainment value and almost disappeared into the cinematic ether to ensure nobody would remember Pitt’s ill-fated sojourn to Eastern Europe, but The Dark Side of the Sun finally got its moment in the spotlight ten years too late.
