The role written specifically for Brad Pitt that may have been an insult: “I’m still a bit unsure”
Stars on the same level as Brad Pitt don’t usually tend to face many issues getting the parts they want, even if he wasn’t left entirely sure whether or not to be offended when he was offered a role that was written specifically for him to play.
As an A-list superstar and a successful producer with Academy Award wins for his efforts on either side of the camera, Pitt has spent a long time in the position of picking and choosing his projects. However, sometimes even the cream of the crop needs to beg their way into a movie, which might explain why he ended up embodying a character designed with him in mind that could be considered an insult.
In most cases, any filmmaker who has got Pitt knocking on their door pleading to be in any of their features in any capacity would be foolish to turn him down, but it goes without saying that Joel and Ethan Coen are not like most filmmakers. They’ve always done things their way, and they weren’t going to hand him a role simply because he wanted one.
There may have been pangs of jealousy in play, too, with Pitt’s close friend and Ocean’s trilogy co-star George Clooney having already worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, leaving the other half of Hollywood’s longest-running prank war on the outside looking in.
Having reached the pinnacle when No Country for Old Men won them the Oscars for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, the Coens returned to familiar territory by abandoning the unflinching modern noir and neo-western trappings of their most recent effort and heading back towards farcical black comedy.
That man Clooney was welcomed back into the fold, playing a paranoid philanderer who gets caught up in the spiralling misadventures of a disc containing the memoirs of John Malkovich’s CIA agent Osborne Cox, which ends up in the hands of two incompetent gym employees with not much between the ears.
Alongside Frances McDormand’s Linda Litzke, Pitt gamely embraces the absurdness of Chad Feldheimer, who could best be described as an enthusiastic idiot. He’d finally gotten his wish to work with the Coens, but as he explained to Movies, he was left feeling rather conflicted about it.
“Well, I had been trying to get into a Coen brothers movie for some time, so when they called, I was very happy to be there,” he said. “But after reading the part, which they said was handwritten for myself, it’s true that I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted. I’m still a bit unsure. But it was just great fun to be there.”
After spending so long making his desire to work with the Coens be known, the siblings responded in kind by handing him a complete and utter buffoon on a silver platter. Insulted or not, it can’t be said that Pitt didn’t dive headfirst into the role and steal the show.
