The one role Brad Pitt played against his will: “I had to do something for the studio”
Female actors are more often the victims of typecasting based on looks than men, but Brad Pitt needed to wage his own battle in that regard. Ridley Scott and Geena Davis singled him out early in his career as the perfect young actor to play hustler JD in Thelma and Louise. Pitt was in his 20s at the time but looked younger, and Scott thought he might be too youthful. George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr, and Mark Ruffalo were all considered, but Pitt prevailed despite being a relative unknown.
As JD, Pitt is a pretty boy playing with a cowboy persona. The actor pours every ounce of relaxed charm laced with malevolence into the role, but it’s a small one, and the fact that he spends a lot of his time on screen with his shirt off helped establish him as something of a heartthrob for future casting directors.
Movies like Johnny Suede, Interview With the Vampire, and Legends of the Fall didn’t help. He made early stabs at changing the narrative with films like Kalifornia (in which he plays a psychopathic serial killer), David Fincher’s Se7en, and, of course, Fincher’s Fight Club, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that things really changed.
During an interview with The New York Times in 2019, Pitt revealed that there was one role that was the last straw. “It was really a turn on Troy,” he said. “I was disappointed in it. When you’re trying to figure things out in your career, you get a lot of advice. People are telling you that you should be doing this, and other people are saying you should be doing that“.
He remembered a project he’d wanted to do but was talked out of, saying that the advice he received was, “No, you need to be doing this other thing,” he said. “You can get to your art project later.”
The experience brought it all together for him. “[T]hat really made me think, ‘I’m following my gut from here on out’.”
Unfortunately, Troy was non-negotiable. “I had to do Troy because — I guess I can say all this now — I pulled out of another movie and then had to do something for the studio. So I was put in Troy,” he explained.
He didn’t hate the experience of working on the film, but he had some very specific grievances about it. “I could not get out of the middle of the frame,” he complained. “It was driving me crazy. I’d become spoiled working with David Fincher. It’s no slight on [Troy director] Wolfgang Petersen. Das Boot is one of the all-time great films. But somewhere in it, Troy became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, Here’s the hero! There was no mystery. So about that time I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films.”
In Troy, Pitt plays Achilles, the mythical warrior of Ancient Greece. The film cost upwards of $175million to make and raked in over $400m at the box office. At nearly three hours long, it wasn’t trying to be anything other than the definitive cinematic take on Homer’s Iliad, but it was far too glossy and overblown to be interesting.
Pitt wasn’t alone in disliking the film. Fellow cast member Peter O’Toole was more blunt. “Ugh, what a disaster,” he said when asked about it, admitting that he could only make it through 15 minutes.
Following that film, Pitt stuck to his word, starting his own production company and appearing in movies from directors like Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, Terrence Malick, and Quentin Tarantino. He may never shed his movie star glamour, but he’s found a way to make it just one aspect of his on-screen persona rather than the defining one.
