In a new interview with The New York Times, Brad Pitt opens up about the year and a half he spent in Alcoholics Anonymous.
The 55-year-old actor sought support following his September 2016 split from Angelina Jolie, who filed for divorce after an alleged confrontation about Pitt’s drinking aboard a private plane with their children.
Though Pitt declined to explicitly address the break-up — “I had family stuff going on. We’ll leave it at that.”
“I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he explained.
Pitt spent the following year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous, taking part in an all-male recovery group.
“You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” he told The New York Times. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
“It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself,” he added. “There’s great value in that.”
Alcohol wasn't his only vice. He admitted that he used to smoke marijuana when his fame first skyrocketed in the 1990s.
“In the ’90s, all that attention really threw me,” he admitted. “It was really uncomfortable for me, the cacophony of expectations and judgments. I really became a bit of a hermit and just bonged myself into oblivion.”
In 2017, he told GQ Style that throughout his early adulthood, he used marijuana and alcohol as “pacifiers” to soothe him and allow him to keep “running from feelings.”
“I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family,” he noted then. “But even this last year, you know — things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem.”
