Brad Pitt unfortunately covers the “summer issue” of GQ. He’s one of three summer-issue covers – Lewis Hamilton and Damson Idris are the two other covers, and obviously, this whole thing is about Pitt’s stupid F1 movie. Reportedly, Apple spent over $300 million on this fakakta movie and I hope it bombs so hard. This GQ profile starts out with all of Brad’s professional bros hyping him and the movie. They even got Jerry Bruckheimer to say “Brad is having the time of his life.” Yeah, Pitt is a 61-year-old domestic abuser who got Apple to spend $300 million on his big-boy-goes-vroom-vroom movie. That’s something else which makes this whole enterprise even crazier: Brad Pitt’s deeply problematic personal history means that he has to largely dodge the kind of interviews where he would be pressed about his lack of relationships with the children he abused or the ex-wife he’s still disparaging. Which is why this GQ piece reads like the studio wrote it using AI prompts. Pitt did field one question about his divorce, just FYI. Some lowlights from GQ:

Director Joseph Kosinski on how Brad is different than Tom Cruise: “Tom always pushes it to the limit, but at the same time is super capable and very skilled. They both have the natural talent for driving. But yeah, I could see Tom maybe scaring us a little bit more.” ​Elsewhere on set, the movie’s action-vehicle supervisor, Graham Kelly, puts a finer point on it: “We’d have had a crash,” he says, smiling. “Tom pushes it to the limit. I mean really to the limit. That terrifies me. I mean, I’ve done loads of Mission: Impossibles with Tom and it’s the most stressful experience for someone like me building cars for him, doing stunts with him. Whereas Brad listens and he knows his abilities, and I think he’d be the first to say, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do that.’ ”

Brad on the SAG strike which derailed the production: “We got to Silverstone which, my God, is a glorious track and became like a home for us and then we’re off and running, and we’re ready! We’re on the grid standing next to the actual racers. The telecast is going to cut us out, but our cameras are going to get us all, we’re a part of it. We have this amazing weekend. Everything goes like clockwork. Everything’s sublime. Everyone’s on a high adrenaline rush. We pull this thing off! I drove in front of 80,000 people in the stands on that day. I didn’t cock up the car, didn’t put it in the wall, didn’t beach it, everything was good! And then the strike happens and I was gutted. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was bumping into walls. I was like, Oh man, man, we have this push and we had this—here we go! And then all of a sudden someone said: Cut. But it was probably the best thing that happened for the movie, and the best thing for me. I got to drive a whole nother year because of it.”

The similarities between F1 drivers & actors: “There’s an isolation. Even a loneliness when you don’t feel like things are clicking. They usually lead to something greater and you can find purpose in it. But there is a definite isolation and it’s not necessarily a negative, it’s an endeavor and a constant discussion with you and yourself of maintaining this thing. And, yes, I think we’ve got it bad. But those guys are so scrutinized and that sport is so revered and there are so many of us that think we could do it, too, just because we drive a car fast down the freeway or something. They get so much sh-t. It is shocking to me. They’ve got to have thicker skin than even us.”

His personal life: “My personal life is always in the news. It’s been in the news for 30 years, bro. Or some version of my personal life, let’s put it that way…. It’s been an annoyance I’ve had to always deal with in different degrees, large and small, as I do the things I really want to do. So, it’s always been this kind of nagging time suck or waste of time, if you let it be that, I don’t know. I don’t know. Mostly I feel pretty…. My life is fairly contained. It feels pretty warm and secure with my friends, with my loves, with my fam, with my knowledge of who I am, that, you know, it’s like this fly buzzing around a little bit.”

Whether he feels relief at finalizing his divorce from Angelina: “No, I don’t think it was that major of a thing. Just something coming to fruition. Legally.”

His thing with Ines de Ramon: Pitt and his new girlfriend, Ines de Ramon, attended a public event together for the first time at the 2024 British Grand Prix, a race won by Hamilton in his final season with Mercedes. I ask Pitt if he and de Ramon deliberately decided to appear publicly for the first time at an F1 race. “No, dude, it’s not that calculated,” Pitt says, chuckling. “If you’re living, oh my God, how exhausting would that be? If you’re living with making those kinds of calculations? No, life just evolves. Relationships evolve.”

[From GQ]

This whole profile/promotional mess made me sad. Maybe the movie will be a hit, maybe there’s an audience for this, but it all just feels like such a waste of time, money and resources. It also feels like Pitt was the wrong person to star as the “wise F1 elder.” As for what he says about his divorce… he makes it sound like it was out of his hands, when clearly, he was the one holding up the divorce as yet another way to punish Angelina for leaving him.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of GQ.