How Brad Pitt offended the Malaysian government: “Aren’t our own people handsome enough?”
Brad Pitt, for a time, was arguably the most marketable face in the world. Rising to fame in the 1990s and hitting the peak of his career in the early 2000s, Pitt was arguably the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob and would be asked to be in advertisements because of this fact.
Though Pitt bombed his audition for Heathers, he broke out with his role in Ridley Scott’s 1991 thriller Thelma & Louise, and I know from attending a recent screening that seeing him in this film now evokes a chuckle from the audience.
Pitt quickly followed up this career-making role with titles such as A River Runs Through It, Interview with the Vampire, and Se7en, and as the ‘90s became the 2000s, Fight Club and his metatextual guest role on Friends as the old high school classmate who hates Rachel (Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston at the time).
This was when Pitt cemented himself in cinematic history through the hit Ocean’s Eleven trilogy, starring with his future spouse Angelina Jolie in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and returning to the Oscars with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Pitt’s later notable credits include Moneyball, The Big Short, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bullet Train, and this year’s F1: The Movie.
Amid his glory days, Pitt faced a particular criticism for one ad he did. Appearing in some Toyota Altis car advertisements in 2002 that were shown in Malaysia, the government there said it was “an insult to Asians.” Former Deputy Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin argued that featuring non-Asian stars would plant a “sense of inferiority among Asians.” Zainuddin went on to ask, “Why must we use their faces in our advertisements? Aren’t our own people handsome enough?”
“We cancelled the ads because they were considered an insult to Asians,” he concluded. Deseret News reports that “The campaign ran for at least several weeks in mid-2002 in newspapers and on television in Malaysia and many other Asian countries” before Zainuddin, at least, prevented it from further continuing in his country.
Admittedly, this incident doesn’t seem like it was really Pitt’s fault, and the people who conceived of the commercial may not have even realised that it wouldn’t be well received everywhere. But it’s a reaction worth talking about. The producers involved probably assumed Pitt’s global popularity made him just as appealing a star to this region as anywhere else, and filmed the ads with him, which could be used elsewhere. But this highlights that Hollywood stars are more likely to be famous worldwide in general, and its minimally diverse on-screen roster could realistically alienate populations.
We have since grown more and more conscious of how people and messages are represented to different audiences—recent history has even seen a major advert backlash, though we may speculate on the intentions in each case. Pitt himself has been involved in controversy on and off the screen, in matters that sort of just faded out of public consciousness.
Though he may be an uncomfortable star for some audiences by now, he still has an Ocean’s Eleven legacy sequel and a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel coming up. He continues to be a very prolific star and filmmaker, executive producing pictures including Mickey 17, Hedda, and Anemone this year alone. But as the world moves on, how we consider the “most desirable” idols will continue to evolve.
