Brad Pitt Got Into Making Ceramics During The Pandemic

There’s a new profile of Brad Pitt out in GQ, in which novelist Ottessa Moshfegh visits him in one of his homes, which he bought from Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira. There are a number of curious revelations. One is that he owns a house once owned by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. (“This was the first place I bought when I made some money in ’94.”) Another is that a “close confidant” is Flea. Another is that he once hunted for buried treasure on a chateau he owned with ex-wife Angelina Jolie in France.

But in other ways, Pitt is a normal guy. Like all of us, he tried to adopt new skills during the height of the pandemic. Unlike most of us (but almost exactly like Seth Rogen), he actually succeeded. Yes, that’s right, the big screen Cliff Booth got really into ceramics, including porcelain:

As we’re talking in his living room, Pitt slips away for a moment and then reappears, looming over the couch on which I sit. He slaps two incredibly heavy candlesticks into my open palms. I understand that these are his creations. Over the pandemic, he learned ceramics. The candlesticks are painted black and gold and are very handsome. “That’s porcelain,” he says. “Everything I read, porcelain’s about being thin so that light penetrates, the thinner you get. It’s a cardinal sin to make it thick.” And yet that’s what Pitt has done, and he’s succeeded. “What I love is the heft, like a Leica camera or a quality watch. You could dump this in the dirt and someone could dig it up 2,000 years later, because it’s been under a volcanic reaction.”

Pitt also speculates that he has prosopagnosia, a rare condition in which he has trouble recognizing people’s faces, which has led some to mistakenly think of him as “remote and aloof, inaccessible, self-absorbed,” as Moshfegh puts it.

It’s a fairly deep interview. At one point the two are reciting lines from Rilke and Rumi poems to each other, with the star of Meet Joe Black talking about how “when you carry real pain and real joy simultaneously, this is maturity, this is growth.” At one point, Moshfegh tells Pitt her “heart just might be broken,” to which he replies, “I think all our hearts are broken.”

After the interview is over, Pitt sends her an email in which he elaborates on matters they discussed, which he’s broken into three sections: “Summation, Clarification, Rumination.” He also tells her, “I consider myself on my last leg.”

But there’s also some happier news: After confessing that he’s “always felt very alone in my life,” Pitt adds that he’s changed for the better, that “it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family.” It’s a lovely thing to learn in a story in an issue of a magazine boasting a pretty odd cover image:

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