Brad Pitt has revealed that he is drinking alcohol again after maintaining his sobriety for seven years.
The subject came up almost incidentally during a wide-ranging new Esquire profile conducted at Pitt’s Los Angeles home. After the actor offered writer Ryan D’Agostino some wine, he was asked whether he kept it around solely for guests. Pitt responded, “I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.”
Pitt said his relationship with alcohol is different this time around, describing his drinking as more restrained than it had been in the past. He acknowledged having a couple of occasions where he became overly confident about how much he could handle, but said he now knows when to stop. “I have to be professional about it,” he explained.
The actor first stopped drinking following his 2016 separation from Angelina Jolie. He subsequently spent a year and a half attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and discussed his sobriety publicly several years later, saying he had reached a point where he needed to give up alcohol altogether.
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Pitt revisited that period as recently as last year during an appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert. He described arriving at AA at a particularly low point in his life and said the openness and vulnerability he encountered in the meetings ultimately became something he looked forward to.
Elsewhere in Esquire profile — which touched on grief, depression, family, and aging — Pitt revealed that he experienced a brief period in which he could understand suicide as a form of relief while dealing with what he described only as “family stuff.”
