When Brad Pitt told Oprah Winfrey he wasn’t sure every marriage could last forever, it sparked a storm about the strength of his relationship with Jennifer Aniston. But with fatherhood beckoning, he is now happier than ever, both professionally and personally. Brad Pitt is officially the world’s bestlooking man – it is a point all women have agreed on since he first hit our screens in Thelma & Louise in 1991. When he married Jennifer Aniston four years ago, Hollywood’s Hottest Couple was born. Pitt, who turned 40 last year, loves pottering around, designing extensions to his and Aniston’s home […]

The fame of Achilles has lasted for more than three millennia, his name enduring through the inexorable march of centuries and civilizations as the prototype for the ultimate warrior, a godlike paragon of valor and manly beauty. The incomparable fighter whose rage nearly doomed his fellow Greeks during the Trojan War, Achilles was immortalized in the Iliad as the pivotal character who finally accepted his fatal destiny and helped to defeat Troy. Heroism? Beauty? The guy who saves the day, seduces the girl, turns the tide of history, and has audiences swooning all over the world? In the kind of […]

Brad Pitt shies away from traditional leading-man roles. Yet his indie sensibility hasn’t dimmed his stardom (or lowered his salary). In the fortress like studio where Pitt does architectural design and photography, and where his wife Jennifer Aniston, paints and sculpts, the 37-year old actor talks about fighting the celebrity trap and honing the fine art of Hollywood mischief-making. One day Brad Pitt was standing in line waiting to buy a hot dog at Pink’s, the shabby if venerable fast-food shack on La Brea, in Los Angeles. Suddenly a van pulled up and a guy inside yelled, “Yo, Brad Pitt! […]

Our hero is under attack. Splayed in the dirt, perfect abs planted in a muddy trench, impossibly blue eyes squinting through a scope, he squeezes the trigger and sprays a few hopeless rounds at the enemy. Around him, a relentless swarm of Vietcong soldiers advance, their heavy artillery buzzing his ears. Though tan and trim in his army fatigues, he collapses in the dirt, overwhelmed by the weight of his weapon. Someone barks, “They’re closing in on you! They’re 600 feet away. They’re 400. They’re 200…Fire! Fire!” “Cut!!!” Brad Pitt pulls a protective brace from his forearm and whips it […]

Brad Pitt takes a swig from a keg of Gatorade, the label of which boasts a drink that is “new and bold”. The drink is so new and so bold that within a few sips, his tongue turns bright pink. “Your tongue is cerise.” He pauses mid-slurp. “What does cerise mean?” Pitt is not a man ashamed to admit the things he doesn’t know, nor to be coy about the things he does know. “Just a kind of pink, like a maraschino cherry, I guess.” “Like Fuchsia?” “A few shades of Fuchsia.” “Really?” He replaces the cap on the disgusting […]

Brad Pitt swishes down the Lisbon streets, one more American on vacation. In his hand he carries a camera, which he shoots from waist height. “I learned a few tricks from the papara*holes,” he announces. “They all look alike to me – horns and a pointed tail and a big Cyclops eye.” He snaps a ragged, down-and-out Portuguese man on a bench and pushes through a flock of pigeons, a little disappointed that the birds, with their seen-it-all urban ways, are too underwhelmed to scatter in front of the lens. Instead they nonchalantly hop out of his path, and he […]

“It’s a metaphor,” says Norton, who plays the film’s nameless narrator. “It’s off the charts. It’s not a photograph; it’s lurid and crazy. For me it’s always about, ‘Have I seen this before?’ And I’d definitely never seen this before. Nobody’s ever seen this before.” The first rule of Fight Club is, you don’t talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is, you don’t talk about Fight Club. The problem is, Pitt and Norton wanted to apply those rules to this interview. It’s 10 p.m on a Sunday in April. I’m in Pitt’s impeccably vacuumed trailer, parked […]

Between this month’s Meet Joe Black and the upcoming Fight Club, Brad Pitt covers both poles of his career, swinging from romance to visceral drama. At the 34-year-old actor’s Los Angeles home, Pitt firmly charts his own course, combining the courtly derring-do required of a $17 million sex symbol with the tasteful domesticity necessary to design an engagement ring or plan a Monet garden. So what is he like? Surprisingly, irresistibly… true – a man whose openess and unspoiled sense of decency are precisely the reasons why he is able to come across to millions of moviegoers as “the real […]

All of this hot California day, I have been on the phone with Brad Pitt’s publicists, trying to determine when and where my meeting with their client will take place. First, it was going to be a four o’clock, in a coffee shop. Then 4:30 at a restaurant. Then we rescheduled for five o’clock, at his place. Then word came that Brad wanted me to swear not to write about how he lived or what his house looked like. In fact, could I not tell anyone I had been to his house at all? At this, I balked.  And so […]