Los Angeles: Oscar-winning actor Brad Pitt recently sat down to interview his Meet Joe Black co-star Anthony Hopkins. However, Pitt himself ended up talking about his struggle with alcohol, learning to own up his mistakes and finding meaning in creativity.
The philosophical chat for the ‘Interview’ magazine began with Pitt asking Hopkins whether the great actor believed that ‘things are fated’.
Hopkins said, “My impression is that I sat on this big beast, whatever it is – life. At some point, I made an unconscious choice to sit on this beautiful, powerful thing. And I just go where it takes me. I think that what happens to people like you and myself. We don’t even know why. Maybe it’s a desire to escape from something. But what I believe now is that we can’t take credit or blame.”
Pitt agreed with Hopkins. He said while he believes he can’t take credit, he still wrestles with the blame. “I’m realising, as a real act of forgiveness for myself for all the choices that I’ve made that I’m not proud of, that I value those missteps, because they led to some wisdom, which led to something else. You can’t have one without the other. I see it as something I’m just now getting my arms around at this time in my life. But I certainly don’t feel like I can take credit for any of it,” the Ad Astra pointed out.
Hopkins asked Pitt about his struggle with alcohol and opened up about quitting drinking forty-five years ago.
Pitt said he saw his drinking habit ‘as a disservice to myself, as an escape’ but agreed that it was necessary to ‘some degree’.
Hopkins, who is currently promoting Two Popes, said he is not ‘evangelist about’ overcoming alcoholism.
“But I look at it, and I think, ‘What a great blessing that was, because it was painful’. I did some bad things. But it was all for a reason, in a way. And it’s strange to look back and think, ‘God, I did all those things?’ But it’s like there’s an inner voice that says, ‘It’s over. Done. Move on,” Hopkins told Pitt.
“So you’re embracing all your mistakes. You’re saying, ‘Let’s be our foibles, our embarrassment’. There’s beauty in that,” Pitt added.
Hopkins said he often cried not out of grief but because of the glory of the life. Pitt said he was ‘famously a not-crier’ and ‘hadn’t cried in, like, 20 years’ but now finds himself moved by friends and children.
Agencies