“That was the first time”: the against-type role that saved Brad Pitt from becoming another pretty face
Brad Pitt is the rare actor who may have suffered because he was too good-looking.
Despite being one of the most successful, bankable, and beloved movie stars in the world, the man is at his best when he’s able to simply be a character actor.
Pitt’s best film roles have been from directors like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Andrew Dominik, who know how funny, scary, idiosyncratic, and genuinely unpredictable he can be, but the issue that he faced early on in his career was being typecast as the generic, handsome male lead, which is usually the least interesting role that an actor can have.
He starred in a series of films like Johnny Suede that were so bad that he was forced to consider whether acting was the right choice for his career, and then, luckily, he landed an opportunity to show his range when he was cast in the serial killer thriller Kalifornia, in which he played the ruthless psychopath Early Grayce.
The film follows the journalist Brian Kessler, played by David Duchovny, and the photographer Carrie Laughlin, in the form of Michelle Forbes, during a road trip in the American southwest, which lands them in a dangerous standoff with Grayce and his girlfriend Adele Corners, played by Juliette Lewis, and while Pitt had complained about how taxing it was to do some of his early television roles, he said that Kalifornia rewired the way he approached acting.
“That was the first time I stepped inside and did some more character stuff and really made some great discoveries,” he told Interview, “Taking that role set a direction for me, where I bounced back and forth between different kinds of things, I started messing it up a little bit.”
Pitt found that having the opportunity to really get into character and delve deeper into the person he was performing showed him how exciting acting could be. “When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn’t really have an interest in them,” he explained, “I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way, and then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man.”
Kalifornia emerged during an era in which serial killers were a hot topic of conversation in both the news and in real life, and the ‘Best Picture’ win for The Silence of the Lambs just a couple years prior had indicated that these films could be considered high art, plus the attention paid to developing true crime stories, such as the OJ Simpson trial, proved that the public was interested in similarly sordid tales.
Kalifornia was an interesting case of a film with a B-movie plot that ended up being much better crafted than it may have looked from the outset. While it sucked viewers in with its shocking sex and violence, the film had something poetic to say about a slice of the country that had been left undisturbed. It certainly offered a different side of Pitt that showed he could play off-the-wall, mentally unstable characters, for it was only two years later that he would earn an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role in Twelve Monkeys.
Ironically, the actor would later earn one of his most iconic roles in a different serial killer thriller, but one where he was on the other side of the law. It was in Se7en that he played David Mills, a young detective pursuing the enigmatic serial killer John Doe, played chillingly by Kevin Spacey.
