Just Another Day at the Pitts’

THE DOGS ARE TRYING TO ESCAPE, SHOVING THEIR NOSES through his knees and climbing all over each other attempting to paw their way out the glass door. He’s got it open just a few inches and is trying to calm them.

The whole entryway is solid glass, a tall plate-glass door flanked by tall plate-glass windows, or walls, so the whole scene is visible: him gently motioning for the dogs to sit, his mouth moving as he shushes them, them scampering around at his feet. Then he hollers across the driveway through the crack in the door: “You’ll get mildly molested for a couple of minutes, then they’ll leave you alone.”

He’s wearing a T-shirt the color of a bright egg yolk over a bright-white T-shirt, gold parachute pants that shimmer, and white sneakers. It’s somehow pretty much the coolest outfit ever.

In the foyer, the two doodles, Sundae (“as in hot fudge”) and Vandy (“came with the name”), do as he said they would, their nails tapping the tile floor as they dance around sniffing and panting. They’re well-behaved, and he is attentive, holding their collars to chill them out.

When the dogs are satisfied, or no longer interested, that’s when he holds out his hand and says, by way of introduction, “Hey! Brad.” As he says this, he cocks his head back just a click, and his famous golden hair sways, and he smiles his smile, the one that makes you wonder what he’s discovered about the world that you haven’t.

On the kitchen island, which is the size of some small kitchens, he goes to work. He unwraps a wedge of yellow Gouda from its supermarket shrink-wrap and slices almost the whole thing, arranging the slices neatly on a board. Then he goes after a chunk of Parmesan the same way. (People will ask later, “Was there someone helping him? Like staff?” There was not. There was Brad Pitt in his kitchen slicing cheese.)

He opens two varieties of cracker: one that resembles Wheat Thins but is better and those crispy dark-brown ones with dried cranberries or something in them. Then he unsheathes a salami from its plastic casing and slices that up too. It’s black on the outside, encrusted in black pepper.

“I was cutting one of these up last week and I walked away for a minute. Came back? Gone. The whole sausage,” he says as he nods toward Sundae. “And no problem, either. But I gave this one a breath mint after, which she needed, and right away there was just, like, trails of vomit. You know the kind that’s hard to clean up? Like finger paint?”

He carries the charcuterie board and the basket of crackers to a table at the far end of the room, past the island’s acreage, past the cozy sitting area in front of the gas fireplace (which is on), by the glass doors that open onto the patio around the pool and the palm trees he bought and had planted around the pool (“because I’m a tree freak”) and, beyond that, the endless city of Los Angeles. He bought this home last fall. He has spent a total of three sporadic weeks in it.

“Guests get the view, that’s the rule,” he says, motioning to a seat for me. He retrieves two small bottles of Perrier from the fridge and grabs us each a paper towel because he doesn’t know where the napkins are. He brings plates, thick ceramic, bright blue with a happy design of interlocking white lines.

I’m getting the royal treatment, I tell him.

“Just another day at the Pitts’,” he says.

He awoke this morning on his own time, no alarm. What time? He laughs, a quick a-ha laugh. “Well, see, it doesn’t matter! The point is, it’s such a luxury,” he says. He read the news for a bit on his phone. He played a little sudoku. He jumped into the gym, got a sweat in. Had a shower. Cleaned his closet.

“I say cleaned,” he says. “I moved some shit around.”

He sits back in his chair and says, with the smile again, “Yeah, just a good old day.”

If this were a story about my neighbor, or my brother-in-law Joe, as interesting a person as Joe is, you wouldn’t have read this far. Guy opens the door, guy settles the dogs, guy puts out some cheese and crackers. Guy cleaned his closet earlier. But it’s a story about Brad Pitt, who resides in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all movie stars, not only today but ever, as measured by any metric you like: raw talent, total earnings, handsomeness, box-office gross, natural magnetism, and the overall quality and entertainment value of his canon so far. And also intrigue. His protracted divorce from Angelina Jolie and how his children don’t talk to him and reportedly dropped his last name, whatever heartbreaking thing is going on there—you’ve perhaps heard about this, and maybe that is part of the reason you keep reading.

Once the novelty of Brad Pitt preparing grocery-store hors d’oeuvres fades, what comes next is an adherance to the conventions of this meeting. He’s in a new movie, which of course is what he’s had me over here to talk about. The movie, though, turns out to be about something real to him. It turns out to be about resilience in the face of desperation and grabbing at shreds of hope, and when we get into that territory, this meeting, this afternoon, turns into something unexpected—rare, even. I didn’t see it coming.

“REMEMBER THE BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD EPISODE—”

We’re talking about getting old, and we’ve just established our age difference: eleven years. (Pitt is sixty-two.) He laughs, and for a flicker of a second he sounds like Floyd, his stoner character from True Romance, which came out more than three decades ago.

“I can’t remember the scenario, but they were being chastised by an older person, and the comeback was just [Beavis voice] ‘You’re old.’ [Laughs.] That was the insult!”

His eyes are as blue and excitable and seductive as they were in that motel room in Thelma & Louise, before most people knew his name. But he is sixty-two, and there used to be a lot of guys who were older than guys like him. Men like Redford, Hackman, Newman, Duvall, Sutherland.

“It’s a strange passing,” he says, stopping what he’s doing. “There was a comforting buffer over us, and now with them gone it’s like losing parents in that way. You’re the last stop.”

Robert Redford was fifty-five and already a legend when he directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It in 1992. (They also made Spy Game together in 2001, directed by Tony Scott—“There’s another fucker I really miss! He was such an original.”) Today Pitt doesn’t love his performance in River as Paul Maclean, the daredevil little brother, the kid who rode the rapids and dated Injuns and gambled too much and died young. But he stole the movie, and three years later he received his first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.

“God, I want my fifties back,” he says, locking in on me a second. “I would do more. Your fifties are just—man, anything that’s on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.”

In his fifties Pitt starred in eleven movies, produced seventeen, and won an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. He’s attacking his sixties hard too. Just now he’s coming off two and a half years of continuous work, the longest stretch of his career. There was the release of the blockbuster F1, including an extended international press tour. Then he shot, in succession, Heart of the Beast, an intense man-and-his-dog story coming out this fall, in New Zealand; a new film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher in which Pitt picks up his Oscar-winning role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth; and, finishing just a few weeks ago, The Riders, a dark thriller set to come out next year.

We pull down the little Perriers pretty quick, and I point out that he’d offered me wine earlier.

At an awards ceremony in 2020, he had thanked his friend Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober and talked more deeply about his sobriety on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, last June. I ask him if the wine is something for guests?

“No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.” Little laugh. He raises his famous opposing-diacritic eyebrows and holds a finger up: “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”

“You can have a glass of wine.”

“Yeah. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.” He likes mornings now anyway, and you can miss a lovely morning when you drink too much the night before, and it’s just not as interesting. Mornings are interesting, and he doesn’t want any more of them to go by unseen. Even on a day like today. His place affords travel-magazine views of the city, but today clouds blot out the blue from horizon to horizon, like pulled cotton. It’s typical for this time of year, but most hosts would have apologized for the sky not being blue on the day of my visit. Not Pitt. He surveys the sky, smiles, and says, “June gloom. I love June gloom. It’s just so much more contemplative and introspective.”

He stares out, grinning proudly, as if he’d built the city himself, arranged the view.

“Lovely.”

THE WORLD CUP IS PLAYING ON MUTE ON A FLAT-SCREEN. Paraguay–Germany. Pitt occasionally peeks to his right to see what’s happening. Instead of the sound of the game, on the Bluetooth he’s got an album playing on repeat that he’s had on repeat for a week: So Help Me God, by Kelsey Lu, a singer and cellist. It’s dream music, carnal; Lu’s voice is a ribbon in the wind. A warm L. A. breeze fills the room, the doodles sleep, and the good old day feels, for a moment, without time. He’s brought over a bowl of plump green grapes, their skins wet, and he plucks a few from their stems and pops them into his mouth one at a time, like popcorn.

On the screen, a Paraguayan player trips, rolls on the pitch like a rag doll, and clutches his leg as if it had been chainsawed.

“I’m gonna start a class for flopping, because these guys are terrible,” he says. He stands and pretends to fall. His hands go limp on his wrists, his feet stumble, he grimaces in exaggerated, fake pain. “It’s some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen. I know drawing a foul is part of the gamesmanship, but man, they need a lot of help. And I’m going to start with [Brazilian star] Neymar, because as balletic as he is on the pitch, man, he needs some help. I’m going to show him how to sell it, do it with understatement, how not to do it too often so it reads as real. I got a whole curriculum.”

He walks over to the fridge to retrieve more hydration, this time two diminutive cans of grapefruit seltzer. He is not finished with the topic.

“It’s one of those things that’s accepted but that no one likes—like forties acting, when the female actors would swoon.” He holds the back of his hand to his forehead and says in a high-pitched lady voice, “ ‘Lawd!’ Bad acting drives me crazy. It’s why I can’t watch porn.”

Pitt is a fan of great acting. He is a student of it—an acting enthusiast. When he talks about an actor or a specific performance he loved, he speaks in bursts of admiration, his easy, sandy voice filling with awe. Mention James Gandolfini, for example, and he is suddenly reverential, whispering, “God, he was good in Killing Them Softly,” a great, wiry little thriller from 2012. “That hotel scene. I felt like I was watching Brando at his best for two days straight. I was just a passenger, enjoying every minute of it.”

The other guy Pitt had the most scenes with in that movie was Richard Jenkins, the dry, soulful, and hilarious character actor.

“Jenkins!” He throws his hands up in the air, gets all smiley, and makes a noise like he just ate the best bite of pie he ever had. “Also one of my all-time favorites. I just had an instant friendship with him. Never disappoints. He’s so goddamn funny.”

He watches everything. He calls himself more of a viewer than a reader. (Except scripts. As both an actor and a producer, he reads a lot of scripts.) He falls asleep watching a show most nights. The Penguin, with Colin Farrell. That was another one. “How do you emote the way he did with an inch of rubber on your face? I’m telling you, it’s impossible to get any kind of emotion out, but he did it! And with a limp, and with having to sit through the chair for prosthetics—that drives me crazy. I had poison ivy a lot as a kid, on my face and neck from, you know, rolling around the woods,” he says, scrunching his face and rubbing his neck as if he had poison ivy right now. “That stuff drives me crazy. I cannot do it.”

He’s been offered roles in streaming shows, and he would take one if it felt right. “Winslet’s done a couple,” he says, of Kate Winslet, whom he doesn’t know but whose acting he loves. “She’s fired some beauties. Mare of Easttown. Staggering. But then this last one she did, The Regime, was just bonkers. She just commits, man. I love her commitment. I’ve tried to put in that level of commitment, certainly in Riders, this last thing I did, coming off watching Kate.”

Long before The Riders comes out, we’ll see Pitt in Heart of the Beast, written and directed by David Ayer. (Ayer also wrote and directed Fury, in which Pitt played a tank commander at the end of World War II who lived, and fought, by a code whose brutality, and purity, made him a hero.) In every role Pitt takes at age sixty-two, he wants to do something he’s never done before as an actor—even some small thing, even in just one scene, a single tendril of emotion he’s never spun in front of a camera in any of his movies before. That’s enough for him.

Beast is the story of an ex–Army Special Forces soldier flying a small plane in Alaska with his dog, who worked with him as a K-9 in the Iraq war. The plane crashes, and man and dog are stuck, miles from nowhere, alone, together, with the exception of a fellow traveler in the form of J. K. Simmons, who passes through the story like a ghost, or a fool. (“J. K. Simmons! Another great actor! Fuckin’ Whiplash! What an incendiary performance.”)

“Beast is a love story,” Pitt says. The movie moved me. I tell him this because it’s true. I tell him it pulled me toward a remote part of my own mind. Made me think about the things we do for each other. Pitt and the beautiful German shepherd who plays Odin are playing anyone who’s ever had to decide what to do when there is nothing left to do, which is to say they are playing all of us.

“WHAT’S THAT INK?” HE’S LEANING FORWARD, LOOKING AT the tattoo on my left forearm.

“That’s good,” he says, I guess of the craftsmanship? “I like that.”

“That?”

I rub a finger over it.

“That’s my brother. His initials, in nautical flags. He died a few years ago.”

He sits back in his chair.

“Oh, man.”

“Mike. Freak heart attack. Forty-six. He loved sailing. So.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“And really well done. How long ago, can I ask?”

“Yeah. It’s been about five years. A little more.”

Immediately, he says, “Ohhh. You’re just getting to the point where you can swallow it.”

Oh. Like he felt it. Like a man who has known loss.

Quite suddenly, that’s what Pitt is. A man who has known loss. Quite suddenly that’s all he is.

A movie star the way I’m a writer and my brother-in-law Joe is a sound engineer and your plumber is a plumber.

He looks up, then back at me, and says, “I think grief is probably the most leveling of all emotions.”

He holds the edge of the table with his fingers and shakes his head back and forth a millimeter, a flinch, so fast you could miss it.

“That’s an understatement, even. Loss is certainly the most profound thing a human can endure. And the loneliness that can ensue is the greatest torture.” It’s the voice he used to say “attack your fifties” but less urgent, offered not as advice but shibboleth.

Pitt looks at the TV, though the game doesn’t seem to register with him at this moment, and out the windows at the gloom, and then back into my eyes. “Man, you’re on year five,” he says, shaking his head slowly now and still holding onto the edge of the table as if for ballast. “Year five, you just start breathing again.”

I nod. The edge of the table is just out of my reach.

The conversation that follows wanders through cancer, divorce, the indignities of Alzheimer’s, dogs we have known and loved. He tells me about meeting groups of women in Africa who smiled joyful smiles and cooked delicious, nourishing food and carried on telling funny stories, and that he later learned that most of them had seen their fathers and brothers slaughtered in front of them. He tells me that since his mother died last year, his dad . . . “let’s just say it’s better to be the one who goes first.” They talk regularly, he and his dad, and Pitt is on his way to Missouri next week for a visit. They will sit on the front porch in the evenings, watching the lightning bugs and listening to the cicadas, and they will talk about the woman who is no longer there. “But we’re country people. We don’t go in depth, you know what I mean? Every now and then it’ll just be one line that cuts to the core, and then we kind of skip on.”

Pitt was telling a friend recently that he feels as if he’s too emotional sometimes, too tightly wound, which can make him wildly angry or wildly ecstatic, and he wishes he could be more even.

“And she said, ‘Yeah, you could do that. You could go to an ashram and be more even.’ But, she goes, ‘I don’t know, I believe in the human experience, and the human experience means I’m here to feel it all. Feel it all. The extreme highs and the depths of the soul-crushing lows.’ And that freed me. I heard that and I went, I’m going to stop feeling like there’s something wrong with that.”

One of the dogs, asleep at my feet, exhales a long, snorting, sweet sigh.

The thing, though, I say, is about those soul-crushing lows. I don’t know if souls can be crushed, but it can feel that way, and when it feels that way, we might never feel those extreme highs again. Or, rather, those extreme highs can feel as if they are only for other people to experience, people who haven’t known our lows or their depths.

I grab a piece of cheese and balance it on a cracker.

Brad Pitt looks at me. He pops a grape. Takes a breath.

The new palms sway just a bit in the wind.

“Yeah,” he says. “I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup. In fact, if I have any afflictions, it’s probably being a congenital optimist. Which has helped many times, and it’s also gotten me—I’ve walked foolishly head-on into a Mack truck because of my optimism. Or, as my forever-funny friend David Fincher will say, Yeah, you see the glass as half full, but it’s half full of urine. Anyway, I’ve never been suicidal except for one little period. And in that one little period, I just thought—I just couldn’t—just didn’t see a way out. The pain was so oppressive that—I wasn’t going to act on this, but I could feel—I could feel the cold steel of the bullet in my head, and it felt like relief. And I thought, Oh, okay, now I understand—I understand suicide, in the sense that it’s just relief. It’s just looking for relief from the pain. But I also think we have incredible survival instincts. And for me, that immediately kicked in, but it was just . . .”

He pauses, his head kind of rolling around on his neck, grappling, groping.

“Yeah. Like, listen: This shit ain’t easy.”

He stares at me.

“And you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”

Only Pitt, Jolie, and their children know exactly what’s going on between them all. Her allegations, his quiet, outside of whatever is said in rooms with lawyers and arbiters. But I ask him, less interested in the drama than in its consequences: When we talk about those moments, the ones when the pain was so oppressive that he could imagine feeling cold steel as relief, are we talking about them?

“Kid stuff?” I ask.

He leans forward on an elbow, takes half a breath, and looks across the table at me. “Family stuff,” he says.

He nods, looking at me. I nod. 

“Family stuff,” I say. Something changes in the room, something molecular, for just a second. Crossed wires. A frame in black and white. 

“Family stuff,” he says. “We could leave it at that.”

THEY’RE INTO PENALTY KICKS NOW. EACH TEAM GETS FIVE KICKS, and should they still be tied after five, it’s sudden death.

They’re tied after five.

“This is why sports is the great thing,” he says, in a crouch, holding his hair. “It’s a whole lifetime in one minute.”

On the credenza in front of the television sit nine small bowls, all different but of a set, each imperfect in a handcrafted way so that, all together, they are perfect. In a brief break in the game I ask him whether they are relics from his career of world travel.

“Nah, I was into matcha for a moment and I purchased elaborate matcha bowls,” he says, shaking his head and looking at the bowls as if for the first time in a while. “I’m all in. Whatever I’m doing, I’m all in.”

I don’t know why, but I ask him if he can tie a bow tie.

“Uh,” he says. “No. And you know how many years I’ve said, ‘I’m gonna learn’? And then I get to the event and I haven’t learned, so I just clip her on and go about my business.”

“You don’t even have someone tie it for you? You just clip her on?”

“Just clip the fucker on. I don’t think I’ve been to an award ceremony without a clip-on.”

“You accepted your Oscar wearing a clip-on bow tie.”

“One hundred percent.”

The players line up, one after another. The goalies squat. Pitt has no stake here, doesn’t care who wins, and hates that one team must.

“I hate—I hate—”

The world-travel part of Pitt’s life is for real. (And he’s a terrible packer, he says, always packing three times too much. He packs entire suitcases he never opens. He tells me that his girlfriend of several years, Ines de Ramon, is not only good at packing but puts the clothes neatly in the hotel dresser drawer. Pitt says he’s “learning.”) Beast, for example, was filmed in New Zealand because the tax breaks there make it less expensive. His mind jumps to the metastasizing practice of using AI to create visual effects for movies that otherwise might be too expensive to make at all. “There’s a lot of pushback against AI, but AI is going to be the very thing that, if used as a tool, is going to help these mid-budget films, forty- to ninety-million-dollar budgeted films, get made,” he says.

And then my mind jumps to the lurking practice of using AI to replace actors. Could a director have made Heart of the Beast starring an AI version of Pitt, the way someone last December created an AI video of him fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop? He pauses, looks at the ceiling.

“Well, they would have got it—no, because—well, it depends on who’s creating it, you know? Who’s behind it, who’s telling the story,” he says, working through his answer in real time.

“Who’s saying, ‘I want to see this emotion from him,’ and then being able to mine through whatever AI provides and going, ‘More in this direction,’ and tailoring it in that way. So they could, but the final product might not be my choices and what I found and discovered in the thing.

“Look, it’s gonna be a very interesting experiment. They’re telling us all to—”

He looks out the window.

“I get great hawks out here. So beautiful. To scan ourselves. I’ve been scanned for the last twenty years, and I’ve always put in my contract: I own them and I destroy them. I should have kept them! All this time I’ve always had them destroyed, because I’m paranoid Ozark boy.”

It’s an interesting thought, this idea of a Brad Pitt that is merely the collection of every emotion he’s expressed and move he’s made in previous movies. It’s especially interesting considering that the real Brad Pitt is looking for things to do that he’s never done as an actor before—emotional expressions that aren’t yet part of the Pitt algorithm, as if he’s trying to outpace himself.

“I heard an AI song the other day that was pretty damn good,” he says. “But it had a repetitive nature to it. It’s not going to be the same as hearing her voice—a woman’s voice, a person’s voice.”

He rubs the back of his head.

“I saw a show the other week in Paris. I saw Flea and Thom Yorke get up onstage and they did Marvin Gaye. With Flea’s jazz band,” he says, looking up at me. “Ohhh, it was off the charts, full of joy.”

He plops the front legs of his chair back down, points a finger, says, “AI can’t do that.”

Pitt is playing Cliff Booth again, the Hollywood stuntman character that won him his acting Oscar, in a movie that comes out November 25. (Could the director, David Fincher, have used AI to concoct a Pitt performance for this movie culled from his performance in Once Upon a Time . . . , in which he played the same character?) At one point, the Booth movie was dead. Tarantino had declared that he would direct ten movies in his lifetime and then retire, and it was set to be his tenth. Then he changed his mind, deciding that for his final film he wanted to do something new, not a movie that could be construed as a sequel.

So that was the end of the Booth movie.

But then Pitt got to thinking. What about Fincher? Fincher had directed him in Seven, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and their friendship is indestructible. Pitt wrote to Tarantino, asking if he could at least show Fincher the script.

“Quentin gave me his blessing,” Pitt says. He’s getting excited telling the story. “Finch and I were on a plane and I gave him the script, and by the time we landed he said, ‘I’m doing it.’ ”

The movie isn’t a sequel, really. It’s “the continuing adventures of . . . .” I saw the first twenty-four minutes of the film in a small screening room at Fincher’s L. A. office, and it’s a movie lover’s dream. Fincher’s kill-shot direction of Tarantino’s ace script and Pitt carrying the whole thing with a smirk? Make another one.

Rather than a sequel, Pitt compares it to the kind of episodic television Tarantino has said he grew up watching, with characters you could follow from adventure to adventure, but each episode also stood on its own. The Rockford Files. Joe Mannix in Mannix.

“Alias Smith and Jones and all that stuff,” Pitt says, listing them off. That one was a short-lived western episodic that ran for a couple years in the early 1970s. “It was based on Butch and Sundance. And I’ll tell you a funny story.”

He rubs his chin, smiling.

“I loved Butch and Sundance. I’d seen that in kindergarten, so I’m probably in first grade, and I love this show Alias Smith and Jones. Maybe I’m in second grade. They start the second season, and I saw on the news that one of the lead actors had killed himself. I was at my grandma’s little three-room house with my folks, and I had to go into the bedroom and silently cry, because I didn’t want them to see me cry. Because I was embarrassed. Because that wasn’t the era for that. Do you know what I mean? Boys and tears.”

I know what he means. I nod a little, my own hand on my chin.

Pitt has been rethinking that Stephen Stills song lately, “Love the One You’re With.” He always hated it, because to him it was about settling for something less than, or at least different from, what you really wanted. His current interpretation is that it’s about appreciating what you do have rather than lamenting what you don’t. The friends who hung in with you, the family who understand you, the people who are still here. He calls it focusing on the positive.

Pitt will sometimes be in his car, rolling along, and see people sitting at a café, eating and laughing, and he will think how happy and carefree they look. He will feel something like envy. Maybe he will think of his children. He will certainly think of his dad, creaking around in the darkened rooms of the old house, all by himself, and he will feel something like anger.

At God? At the world? At those carefree people?

“It’s a hard one to square,” he says. “But I’m going to go back to: I think the challenge is to hold both. Grief, if you survive it, leaves a gaping hole, but it also leaves profound beauty. It’s an aching beauty, but it’s beauty.”

The question is, or one question is, when you feel like that actor in Alias Smith and Jones did, or like Pitt did during the family stuff—and we’ve all felt that way, whether we admit it to ourselves or not—what can a person do? How do you climb out of it?

“Wow,” he says and stays silent for a moment. Then: “I don’t see it as climbing out of it. It’s going through it and trying and trying and trying and trying to the point of exhaustion and then trying again. I don’t want to ignore the place where you run up against the wall. But I just one day woke up, and it just felt a little sunnier and the air felt a little sweeter. Just microdoses of it.”

As Kelsey Lu sings, a Paraguayan player knocks Germany out of the tournament with one kick. An upset. Our conversation goes to things like schedules, movie screenings, and the winding down of the afternoon. He’s rummaging around for a sticky note and a pen to give me his email address, muttering, “Where the . . . ?”

And then, as if a switch were tripped, he snaps back to the idea. He needs to finish the thought. He stops looking for a pen.

He says, “Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way. Maybe we’ve got to start with letting go of all control, that need, that belief about the way things should be or what should have been or how things are supposed to be and then trying to control it, trying to hammer and tong it into some kind of shape, which is impossible. Maybe that’s really the road to waking up and the sun’s a little brighter one day and the air’s a little sweeter. And that in itself is acceptance, I would say.”

I’m looking at the little matcha bowls, nodding a little. The Paraguay players are rolling on the grass, hugging each other now, shouting, joyful. I think I see a German cry.

Pitt says he’s going to order Korean barbecue for dinner tonight. From Genwa, the place on Wilshire. It’s the best. He uses Postmates. And then maybe he’ll watch something.

Credits

Chairperson: Avarna Jain

CEO: Debashish Ghosh

Esquire India Editor: Rahul Gangwani

Story: Ryan D’Agostino

Photography: Chantal Anderson

Styling: George Cortina

Hair: Jason Low

Makeup: Jean Black

Production: Hyperion

Set Design: Peter Gueracague

Tailoring: Susanna Badalyan

16mm: Luke Hanlein

Directors of Video: Amanda Kabbabe; Kathryn Rice

Supervising Producer: Evan Murray-Real

Director of Photography: Darren Kho

16mm DP: Luke Hanlein

Senior Editor: Sam Miller

Special Thanks to The Garibaldina Society, LA

Esquire Executive Creative Director: Nick Sullivan

Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin Hoops

Esquire Visual Director: James Morris

Esquire Senior Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler

Esquire Editor-in-Chief: Michael Sebastian