“Brangelina” may be over, but the drama has just begun. The news of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s divorce quickly made waves—especially since substance abuse is rumored as the reason for the A-list couple’s split. Echoing the recent wine-soaked divorce of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, messy details continue to emerge. When Jolie filed for divorce on Sept. 15, she claimed it was “for the safety of the family.” Immediately, stories and speculation swirled. According to TMZ, “the trigger was a conflict over the kids, substance abuse and anger.” Legal papers cite “irreconcilable differences” for the divorce, putting to end a two-year marriage that left the actress “fed up” with his behavior. Tellingly, Jolie has also asked for joint legal custody, not joint physical custody. It’s an important distinction that raises (or is meant to raise) hard questions about Pitt’s sobriety and his fitness as a father.
Not So Far in the Past?
The 52-year-old actor’s pothead past really isn’t news. One feature meticulously details Pitt’s “lifelong battle with the demon weed,” even though the actor has worked hard to “distance himself from his youthful stoner image.” It’s apparently not just a past that he can’t outrun—according to the recent spate of news, it’s a present that’s now wreaking havoc on everyone in his life. In 2009, when Pitt visited Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher brought up Pitt’s weed-smoking days. “You rolled these perfect joints,” the show’s host complimented him. “The most perfect joint I have ever seen. Like a machine. It was better than a cigarette.” Pitt laughed it off, quickly adding that he swore off marijuana after having kids. “I’m a dad now. You want to be alert,” the actor said. The anecdote is amusing, if only because he’s supposedly recalling crazier days that he’d long since left behind.
Over the years, Pitt has grown from That Heartthrob in Thelma & Louise to a respected, Oscar-nominated actor (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) who also just happens to have become one of Hollywood’s rare examples of a stable husband and father. That’s what makes the news so disconcerting. Still, it’s not difficult to see shades of Pitt’s wild past throughout his roles—most notably in Pitt’s too-convincing turn in 1993’s True Romance as Floyd, the lovable pothead who lives in a world of closed drapes who gives hit men information about his friends. (Floyd is also one of the few characters who doesn’t actually violently die in that movie, by the way.) But questions abound about whether Pitt ever truly put substance abuse behind him. In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago that director Quentin Tarantino visited Jimmy Kimmel Live and recounted a story about ripping it up on Pitt’s vineyard, just prior to them shooting Inglorious Basterds together: “We’re poppin’ rosé and he’s got this really cool Pink Floyd kind of rosé,” Tarantino recalled. “We’re knocking it back, and then a smoking apparatus of some sort found its way on the table. It was like a pop can, red with a little silver stripe. When Brad woke up the next day, he was like, Ughhhhhhh. He sees the smoking apparatus and he starts counting the empty bottles of wine. It was six.” (Pitt even confirmed the story to a roomful of reporters.)
What’s Happening Now?
TMZ insists that the divorce is entirely “because he’s smoking weed, drinking alcohol and that combined with an anger problem poses a risk to their kids.” Celeb gossip sites like Hollywood Life quickly weighed in by saying that Pitt is going to rehab to save his marriage: “[Pitt] is allegedly vowing to get sober and is hoping this will make Angie reconsider leaving him,” the site said. “He’s even allegedly saying he’ll go to rehab and she doesn’t have to agree to take him back until he has 90 days sober, so she knows it’s not just a fleeting commitment.”
Taken with a grain of salt or none at all, it’s a telling remark about just serious a role Pitt’s substance abuse may have played in the divorce. The Huffington Post Canada reported that Pitt got “verbally abusive” and “physical” with one of his children on a transatlantic flight: “It was rumored that the child involved in the alleged abuse was 15-year-old Maddox,” the site said. The FBI has also gotten involved “since the alleged incident occurred in the air while the family was traveling from France to the United States.” And in a world where nothing is private, the incident was also apparently caught on video. “According to insiders, Pitt can be seen on video ‘looking drunk’ and ‘yelling.’ [He] is seen yelling a lot during it, but nothing physical,” US Weekly reported.
What the Future Holds
“[Pitt] knows so much of their issues have to do with his drinking and pot smoking, and he’s reportedly swearing that if he gets clean, their marriage will be great again,” Hollywood Life claims. Some reports indicate that there’s no truth to that story at all, while others speculate that Pitt is going so far as to reach out to Jolie’s family for help. That said, Jolie’s father, actor Jon Voight, is as much in the dark about the reason for the split as anyone. “It’s very sad,” Voight said. “Something very serious must have happened for Angie to make a decision like this. I don’t know what it is. It’s a sad thing.”
In many ways, the two films that Pitt and Jolie appeared in together now act as bookmarks for their relationship. They met and fell in love on the set of the 2005 action film Mr. & Mrs. Smith—a fun, high-energy summer blockbuster, which is a far cry from last year’s turbulent, doomed-marriage story By the Sea. If the substance abuse allegations are true, it’s sad to consider how it’s torn the family completely apart. “It’s a big thing to bring together a child and a father,” the actress once told Vogue. “It had never crossed my mind that [Maddox] was going to need a father—certainly not that it would be this man I just met. Until, of course, I got to know Brad, and realized that he is naturally a wonderful father.” The divorce is a sad twist in a story that many people assumed would have a perfect Hollywood ending.
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