The unusual movies that make Brad Pitt cry: “That got me”
Aside from being a superb Hollywood actor, Brad Pitt holds an almost ethereal allure, radiating a gooey heart with gruff, defined features.
It’s this magnetising personality that has made him such an irresistible actor, teaming up with some of the finest filmmakers of contemporary cinema throughout his career, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Terrence Malick, David Fincher and Adam McKay.
While he may be a household name now, his early career was not such smooth sailing, appearing in a number of independent film roles, such as in The Dark Side of the Sun and Cutting Class in the late 1980s, before reaching stardom with the release of Ridley Scott’s feminist masterpiece Thelma and Louise in 1991. Whilst Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon took the headlines for their starring roles in the film, thanks to his stunning appearance as the heartthrob J.D, Pitt steadily rose in prominence throughout the remainder of the decade.
These days, Pitt is best known for his work with Quentin Tarantino on the sprawling drama Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and director Damien Chazelle on the remarkably similar celebration of the movie industry, Babylon.
Even after decades at the top of his game, Pitt has maintained his affable personality, a feat that cannot be said for each and every one of his fellow Hollywood stars. This was proven in 2013 when the actor appeared in an interview with W Magazine, where he talked about which movies had made him cry over the years.
“I’m not much of a crier at films. I’ll tear up every now and then but not much of a crier,” Pitt prefaced the video by announcing, recalling only two times in recent memory that he could not hold back the floodgates. Surprisingly, his most recent pick was not The Green Mile, nor Up, nor Titanic. Instead, he felt overwhelming emotion watching How to Train Your Dragon, recalling, “at the end, he’s lost his leg, and they’re living in harmony with the Dragons, that got me”.
Though the beloved 2010 animated Dreamworks movie How to Train Your Dragon has got its loyal fans, the film is not particularly known for its weepy finale; but hey, we’re not judging Pitt.
The actor’s second choice for recent movies that made him cry is also a bit of an oddity, particularly as the film itself comes with a story to contextualise the tears. “This was a time when I actually wept at a film,” Pitt recalled, explaining: “I was coming back from Cabo, and I had to go to Montreal, and I got hit with Montezuma’s Revenge, I could not keep anything down, and I was stuck in this hotel room”.
Stuck, bed-bound and with nothing to do, Pitt came across a Kevin Kline movie that he recalls as ‘To Build a House’ (he means the 2001 drama Life as a House), a film about an architect who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and takes custody of his misanthropic teenage son.
What Pitt’s choices reveal is less about the films themselves and more about the state in which he encountered them. Neither selection fits neatly into the usual canon of cinematic tearjerkers, but both arrived at moments where vulnerability slipped through the cracks. In that sense, the emotional response feels almost accidental, shaped as much by exhaustion, illness or quiet reflection as by narrative intent. It’s a reminder that cinema doesn’t always move us because it aims to, but because it meets us where we already are.
There’s also something quietly endearing in Pitt’s openness about these moments. For an actor so often framed through toughness, cool detachment or physical presence, admitting to being undone by an animated dragon or a late-night hotel-room drama humanises him in an unexpected way. It reinforces the idea that even the most mythologised stars experience art in the same fragile, unpredictable way the rest of us do, sometimes at their weakest, sometimes when they least expect it.
“I don’t know if it would still hit me the same way, but you know, on my 27th hour of just pure wretchedness, this movie crushed me, just crushed me,” Pitt exclaimed, finishing his tale by concluding: “In fact, I should see it again and see if it has the same effect”.
