Brad Pitt Recalls One Brief Moment of Suicidal Thoughts Amid ‘Family Stuff’

Brad Pitt has revealed that he is drinking again after seven years of sobriety, telling Esquire that he now limits himself to “a few” and tries to keep it controlled. The admission comes nearly a decade after the 2016 private-plane incident involving Angelina Jolie and their children, which preceded Jolie filing for divorce and Pitt later becoming sober. Pitt also reflected on reaching a very low point during that period and said he experienced suicidal thoughts, although he did not intend to act on them.

The family context makes the revelation harder to separate from Pitt’s public image. Shiloh legally removed “Pitt” from her surname in 2024, while Maddox, Zahara and Vivienne have since filed petitions seeking to do the same.

Pitt is currently promoting The Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher from a Quentin Tarantino script, with a theatrical rollout planned before its Netflix release.

“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.”

Esquire

A Redemption Arc That Keeps Missing the Harder Questions

What bothers me most is how casually the media frames his drinking after everything that has been publicly alleged and documented around Pitt’s family breakdown. Saying he can now “have a few” may sound harmless in isolation, but it lands very differently when alcohol was part of the allegations surrounding the 2016 flight and Pitt later publicly linked that period to his decision to get sober.

Also, years before the 2016 plane incident, Pitt admitted that he had been drinking when a young Zahara began choking on a piece of ice she had picked up from the floor. He said the frightening moment made him realise he needed to be more alert as a parent and prompted him to cut back on alcohol.

Too often, the media gives famous men soft-focus interviews about growth, reflection and second chances while backgrounding the harm done to women and children. Pitt has continued to receive prestige profiles, major roles and sympathetic coverage despite the serious allegations surrounding the 2016 flight and his public estrangement from several of his children.

That is what frustrates me so much. The media keeps centering the story on his feelings, his mornings, his introspection, his relationship with alcohol. Meanwhile, the press treats Angelina Jolie and their children like supporting characters in a redemption arc built around him. Or worse, they paint Angelina as the villainous ex-wife who poisoned their children against their father.

And that pattern is bigger than Brad Pitt. Hollywood has a long history of giving powerful men endless opportunities to rehabilitate their image while the people hurt by them are expected to disappear quietly. At some point, accountability has to mean more than sounding reflective in a glossy interview.

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