Brad Pitt and George Clooney would love for you to believe that they’re the best of friends.
The PR machine surrounding the pair’s new movie Wolfs – out in the UK on September 20 – focused heavily on the actor’s bromance and combined star power.
So much so that the movie itself took a backseat to the two Hollywood heavyweight’s in the lead up to its premiere.
In the style of Deadpool and Wolverine, it seems likely that Wolfs will only thinly veil Pitt, 60, and Clooney, 63, behind characters, giving them a very thin fourth wall so they can allude to their own stardom and real-life friendship.
Most of all, the film and the press surrounding it is working hard to distract from the controversy exploding in Pitt’s personal life.
Pitt and his ex-wife Angelina Jolie infamously split up after an alleged incident on a private plane in 2016 in which she accused her husband of being drunk and aggressive.
Now, eight years later, several of the pair’s children have dropped their father’s last name in favour of Jolie’s, reigniting discussion of the incident.
This has led many on the Internet to wonder: Why have the allegations of abuse against Pitt been largely ignored when other celebrities have been canceled for far less? How has Pitt’s reputation remained so spotless?
Wolfs’ entire purpose may be to serve as a kind of preemptive life support for Pitt’s reputation before the murmurs of cancellation can get louder.
And Clooney and his squeaky clean reputation and old school charm (and by extension, his human rights lawyer wife Amal and their young twins) is the perfect person to help scrub up Pitt’s image.
Why hasn’t Brad Pitt been cancelled?
It doesn’t feel like an accident that a recent GQ interview, titled George Clooney and Brad Pitt are Hollywood’s BFFs, took place at the very winery that has been at the center of an ugly legal dispute between Pitt and Jolie.
The extensive profile reads less like promotion for a film and more like lobbying material from a campaign for the position of the most famous person in the world
The pair repeatedly refer to the sheer enormity of their careers and influence, sometimes playfully, other times with unmistakable earnestness, bringing up names like Clark Gable and Gregory Peck in the same breath as their own. There’s also an undeniable air of martyrdom.
At one point, Pitt compares his mega-fame to being hunted by a lion, saying: ‘You watch those nature documentaries.
‘There’s that one gazelle that gets caught out. And then the lions and then the cheetahs are chasing him. And then afterwards if they escape, they go through the trauma, the shakes…’
Shortly after, Clooney says (probably not inaccurately) that they’re among 5 or 6 people in the whole world who are unable to go on a walk in Central Park without being swarmed. It’s clear that it’s at least partly a bid for sympathy.
They go on to list their various achievements, practically reading out their respective Wikipedia pages.
Though the pair detail their personal and career aspirations – as well as their decades-long friendship, which is only made convincing by how often they talk over each other – Pitt’s six children are never mentioned, even as Clooney’s twins interrupt the interview.
This makes any personal revelations Pitt does share come across like a man pointing at a scrape on his right knee to distract from his blown-off left leg.
Anyone who knows anything about actors of Pitt and Clooney’s magnitude knows the interview was anything but accidental or off the cuff. The moment Amal and the children ‘surprise’ Pitt and Clooney and join them for lunch comes off as especially carefully crafted.
Clooney’s seven-year-olds ‘crawl all over’ Pitt like a beloved uncle as he warmly tells them about the bunnies and other animals on the property that need feeding, earning squeals of delight.
It’s a moment that manages to paint the actor as a family man while still altogether ignoring the existence of his actual children.
Pitt’s media strategy can be summed up as exactly that: Ignore and distract.
And it’s no wonder that he’s handled bad publicity with such deftness over the years. Pitt hired crisis management expert Matthew Hiltzik (who also represented Johnny Depp in his case against Amber Heard) immediately after the 2016 plane incident.
Similar to his work with Depp, Hiltzik appears to recognise that the worst thing Pitt could do is get defensive; instead, he just has to remind fans why they’ve always loved him while implying the vaguest trace of remorse.
Hiltzik’s influence can be felt in all of Pitt’s (rare) interviews since 2016, with the star harping on his accomplishments and undeniable talent while balancing out the narrative with seemingly ‘vulnerable’ revelations about his time in AA.
He brought out the same script for GQ, this time taking it a step further: ‘But you know they came down on me for that? AA did. They were like, “It’s anonymous.” I was like, “Well yeah, but if I want to…”’
It all paints an image of Pitt as reformed and simultaneously victimised, a father unfairly maligned as he tries to get his life back on track and share his brilliance with the world.
Afterall, this is the man whose career and reputation survived cheating on America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston. He knows that we’ll bend over backwards to make excuses for him.
In a 2019 interview with Anthony Hopkins, he even railed against a cancel culture he’s seemingly immune to, cleverly positioning himself as the victim of a culture war without ever explicitly placing himself in the narrative.
He said: ‘I think we’re living in a time where we’re extremely judgmental and quick to treat people as disposable. We’ve always placed great importance on the mistake. But the next move, what you do after the mistake, is what really defines a person.
‘We’re all going to make mistakes. But what is that next step? We don’t, as a culture, seem to stick around to see what that person’s next step is. And that’s the part I find so much more invigorating and interesting.’
The actor remaining mostly silent about his family while pushing subtle narratives about second chances is clever because it allows for Brad Pitt – not the person, but the cultural icon and all that that symbol represents – to fill in the blanks in the public’s perception.
He’s gorgeous, talented, powerful, wealthy, famous, charismatic, and among the most beloved movie stars to ever live. All he needed to do for fans to mostly forget about any flaws in his character is sit back, relax, and trust that the rules don’t apply to him.
The actor recently rounded out his ‘healthier-than-ever’ image with a new girlfriend, 31-year-old Ines de Ramon, with whom he appeared publicly for the first time at the Venice Film Festival 2024, smiling on the red carpet with the Clooneys.
The hard launch of the relationship trumped the trickle of headlines talking about Jolie and Pitt both appearing at the film festival, which risked once again shining a major spotlight on the controversy – before Ramon appeared arm-in-arm with Pitt and changed the conversation. Ignore and distract.
To put it simply, Pitt is just too powerful and beloved to face the same cultural backlash others in his position might.
One of the most successful actors of all time – capable of making a film a success just by attaching his name to it – he also became one of the most influential producers in Hollywood after he co-founded the production company Plan B Entertainment in 2001.
Unusually, while the Wolfs press tour is clearly intended to make Pitt seem likable, it also hasn’t shied away from advertising his far-reaching influence in the industry.
The angle is far from the lovable class clown image used to promote Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds in the latest Deadpool outing, instead presenting Pitt as a tycoon with the untouchable glamour of old Hollywood.
Considering that members of the media elite often go to great pains to make themselves seem relatable and down to earth, its an uncommon strategy.
And given the serious allegations still swarming around Pitt, it can’t help but feel a little like a threat – or at the very least a reminder that some people are simply too big to bring down.
While it’s impossible to separate authentic moments from PR strategy, one thing is clear: Whatever Pitt is doing – or not doing – to quell the controversy is working.
What happened between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?
Angelina Jolie and Pitt split in 2016 after two years of marriage and twelve years as a couple, and have since been embroiled in bitter divorce and custody battles as well as a legal dispute over their winery, Chateau Miraval.
The divorce followed an incident on a private jet on which the couple was accompanied by all six of their children.
According to court filings, amid the flight, ‘Pitt choked one of the children and struck another in the face’ and ‘grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her,’ the filing states, adding that at one point, ‘he poured beer on Jolie; at another, he poured beer and red wine on the children.’
While no criminal charges were ever brought against Pitt, the F.B.I. report at the time described Jolie as ‘conflicted on whether or not to be supportive of charges’ related to the case as she wanted to keep her children from having to relive the trauma inflicted on them that day.
Another court filing from Jolie claimed that Pitt was routinely abusive. The filing read: ‘While Pitt’s history of physical abuse of Jolie started well before the family’s September 2016 plane trip from France to Los Angeles, this flight marked the first time he turned his physical abuse on the children as well. Jolie then immediately left him.’
Later, after Jolie sold her half of the winery the pair bought together without notifying Pitt, he sued her.
Reportedly, Jolie had turned to a different buyer for her share of the winery after she declined to agree to Pitt’s non-disparagement clause.
‘She has gone to great lengths to try to shield their children from reliving the pain Pitt inflicted on the family that day,’ Ms. Jolie’s lawyers wrote in the cross-complaint in the case.
‘But when Pitt filed this lawsuit seeking to reassert control over Jolie’s financial life and compel her to rejoin her ex-husband as a frozen-out business partner, Pitt forced Jolie to publicly defend herself on these issues for the first time,’ it continued.
This wasn’t the first hint that Pitt was less than a perfect husband to Jolie. The actor agreed to work with Harvey Weinstein on the 2012 film Killing Them Softly after Jolie revealed to him that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
Jolie said Pitt approached Weinstein to work as a producer for the thriller, telling The Guardian of her then-husband’s decision: ‘We fought about it. Of course it hurt.’
Is Brad Pitt estranged from his children?
While it remains unclear if Pitt has any contact with his younger children, his older children have been open about wanting nothing to do with their father.
More recently, Pitt and Jolie’s 18-year-old child – born Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt in 2006 – filed documents to drop her famous dad’s surname.
Shiloh isn’t the first of her siblings to erase Pitt from her name – as 16-year-old Vivienne also appears to have done the same.
Her choice was revealed on the playbill of a musical she appeared in, with the credits listing her just as ‘Vivienne Jolie.’
Their sister, Zahara, introduced herself as Zahara Marley Jolie when she joined the Mu Pi chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at Spelman College in November.
Pitt and Jolie’s son Pax has also made his feelings on his father extremely public, posting on Instagram in 2020 a message that resoundingly condemned his father.
The teenager wrote: ‘Happy Father’s Day to this world-class a***hole! You time and time and again prove yourself to be a terrible and despicable person.
‘You have no consideration or empathy toward your four youngest children who tremble in fear when in your presence. You will never understand the damage you have done to my family because you are incapable of doing so.
‘You have made the lives of those closest to me a constant hell. You may tell yourself and the world whatever you want, but the truth will come to light someday. So, Happy Father’s Day, you f***ing awful human being!’
As it stands, Pitt remains all but unaffected by his family’s allegations against him.
He told GQ: ‘I’m really just trying to enjoy the people that I love around me and just living. [He gestures out at the vineyard.] I don’t know how to not sound cheesy about it, but just the air is fresh and the grass is green and I’ve just kind of become that guy a little bit.’
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