Brad Pitt covers the September issue of Esquire, mostly to promote The Adventures of Cliff Booth. That’s the pseudo-sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with a focus on the Cliff character, played by Brad. Tarantino wrote the story but David Fincher directed it. It looks weird and I try to skip most of Brad’s films these days, so who knows. Anyway, the point of this Esquire piece is not merely to promote Pitt’s upcoming projects, it’s about Brad’s decade-long dance of trying to play the victim for what he did to Angelina Jolie and their children. All of the kids are legal adults now, and four of them have dropped “Pitt” from their names legally (or in the process of doing so). In my opinion, Brad is clearly worried about what happens if and when the kids start talking. Which explains some of what he says in this piece. Some highlights:

He wishes he was in his 50s: “God, I want my fifties back. I would do more. Your fifties are just—man, anything that’s on your mind, go. Go attack it. Go attack it now.”

He’s no longer sober: “No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.” Little laugh. He raises his famous opposing-diacritic eyebrows and holds a finger up: “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities… Yeah [I can have a glass of wine].. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.”

On grief: “I think grief is probably the most leveling of all emotions…That’s an understatement, even. Loss is certainly the most profound thing a human can endure. And the loneliness that can ensue is the greatest torture.”

His parents: He tells me that since his mother died last year, his dad . . . “let’s just say it’s better to be the one who goes first.” They talk regularly, he and his dad, and Pitt is on his way to Missouri next week for a visit. They will sit on the front porch in the evenings, watching the lightning bugs and listening to the cicadas, and they will talk about the woman who is no longer there. “But we’re country people. We don’t go in depth, you know what I mean? Every now and then it’ll just be one line that cuts to the core, and then we kind of skip on.”

His friend talking to him about “evening out” his emotions: “And she said, ‘Yeah, you could do that. You could go to an ashram and be more even.’ But, she goes, ‘I don’t know, I believe in the human experience, and the human experience means I’m here to feel it all. Feel it all. The extreme highs and the depths of the soul-crushing lows.’ And that freed me. I heard that and I went, I’m going to stop feeling like there’s something wrong with that.”

He was never suicidal: “Yeah. I was never suicidal in any way. It just was not my makeup. In fact, if I have any afflictions, it’s probably being a congenital optimist. Which has helped many times, and it’s also gotten me—I’ve walked foolishly head-on into a Mack truck because of my optimism. Or, as my forever-funny friend David Fincher will say, Yeah, you see the glass as half full, but it’s half full of urine. Anyway, 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. It’s just looking for relief from the pain. But I also think we have incredible survival instincts. And for me, that immediately kicked in, but it was just . . .Yeah. Like, listen: This sh-t ain’t easy. And you’re talking to a guy who won the lottery.”

On Angelina & the kids: Only Pitt, Jolie, and their children know exactly what’s going on between them all. Her allegations, his quiet, outside of whatever is said in rooms with lawyers and arbiters. But I ask him, less interested in the drama than in its consequences: When we talk about those moments, the ones when the pain was so oppressive that he could imagine feeling cold steel as relief, are we talking about them? “Kid stuff?” I ask. He leans forward on an elbow, takes half a breath, and looks across the table at me. “Family stuff,” he says. He nods, looking at me. I nod. “Family stuff,” I say. Something changes in the room, something molecular, for just a second. Crossed wires. A frame in black and white. “Family stuff,” he says. “We could leave it at that.”

[From Esquire]

I’m sure people will talk a lot about the conversation about the depths of his lows, and what sounds like undiagnosed clinical depression. But it sounds like that moment happened in the past decade… the same years he’s been bribing judges and suing Angelina over nothing and treating his kids like sh-t. You can have sympathy for him while still acknowledging that he’s an abusive jackass who is continuing his harassment of Jolie to this day and he can’t even summon any words in defense of his behavior on the record, in an interview.

Oh, and the sobriety thing is the least surprising news ever. Ten years ago, Brad reportedly did some sort of half-assed 12-step program to dry him out for a time. I think he legitimately got sober. But it didn’t stick, and that’s been clear for a while.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid. Cover courtesy of Esquire.