Amid Brad Pitt’s lengthy career in Hollywood, he’s been candid about his mental and physical health challenges through the years.
“I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self — the beauty and the ugly— that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy,” the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star told GQ in an August 2022 profile. “I think all our hearts are broken.”
Pitt, who was previously married to Angelina Jolie between 2014 and 2016, often used alcohol as a coping mechanism before focusing on his sobriety.
“I had a really cool men’s [Alcoholic’s Anonymous] group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe,” he told the magazine. “Because I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.”
The Oklahoma native — who shares children Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, twins Vivienne and Knox with the Eternals actress —has previously been candid about his sobriety struggles.
“The fact is, we all carry pain, grief and loss,” Pitt told The New York Times in September 2019 of dealing with his 2016 split from Jolie. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. So you open up those boxes. I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.”
He continued: “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. 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. There’s great value in that.”
The Ad Astra star made headlines in June 2022, revealing he has been self-diagnosed with prosopagnosia or “face blindness.”
“Nobody believes me! I wanna meet another [who has the same condition],” he told GQ at the time. “I always felt very alone in my life … alone growing up as a kid, alone even out here, and it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family. What’s that line, it was either Rilke or Einstein, believe it or not, but it was something about when you can walk with the paradox, when you carry real pain and real joy simultaneously, this is maturity, this is growth.”
Scroll below to revisit Pitt’s health ups and downs through the years:
