Amid Brad Pitt’s lengthy career in Hollywood, he’s been candid about his mental and physical health challenges through the years.
“I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self — the beauty and the ugly— that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy,” the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star told GQ in an August 2022 Profile. “I think all our hearts are broken.”
Pitt, who was previously married Angelina JolieBetween 2014 and 2016, he used alcohol as a coping mechanism, before focusing on sobriety.
“I had a really cool men’s [Alcoholic’s Anonymous] group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe,” he told the magazine. “Because I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.”
The Oklahoma native — who shares children Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, twins Vivienne and Knox with the Eternals actress —has previously been candid about his sobriety struggles.
“The fact is, we all carry pain, grief and loss,” Pitt told The New York Times September 2019, he dealt with his 2016 divorce from Jolie. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. You have to open the boxes. I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.”
He continued: “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was a safe place where there was no judgment, and you were not judged. It was liberating to show your worst side. There’s great value in that.”
The Ad Astra star made headlines in June 2022, revealing he has been self-diagnosed with prosopagnosia or “face blindness.”
“Nobody believes me! I would like to meet another [who has the same condition],” he told GQ It was then. “I always felt very alone in my life … alone growing up as a kid, alone even out here, and it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family. What’s that line, it was either Rilke or Einstein, believe it or not, but it was something about when you can walk with the paradox, when you carry real pain and real joy simultaneously, this is maturity, this is growth.”
Scroll below to revisit Pitt’s health ups and downs through the years:
