About a decade ago, actor Brad Pitt's uber-successful Hollywood career took a backseat in his life, overshadowed by the highly publicized split from Angelina Jolie.
At the time, Pitt was struggling with drinking and substance issues for more than two decades, starting from his college days in the 1980s.
He went sober in 2016 after a violent plane altercation, in which he allegedly hurt Jolie and their children while drunk.
Highlights
- Brad Pitt recently revealed that he went back to drinking in moderation after seven years of sobriety.
- The actor decided to stop drinking after a plane incident in 2016 that led to his and Angelina Jolie’s divorce.
- Pitt revealed that the divorce and the subsequent estrangement from all six of his children made him feel like ending his life.
His then-wife filed for divorce three days after the incident, and their children have reportedly distanced themselves from him ever since.
In a new interview published on August 10, the actor worried his fans by revealing he has welcomed the habit back into his lifestyle.
“Luckily, he’s not around his kids anymore, so they thankfully aren’t in any danger,” one user commented.
Brad Pitt can now have a “few glasses of wine” after 7 years of sobriety
On August 10, 2026, Brad Pitt, 62, spoke with Esquire’s Ryan D'Agostino at his Los Angeles home, bought in 2025, and offered the interviewer wine before the conversation began.
When asked if he kept wine at home for guests, Pitt revealed that he had broken his sobriety a while back, but consumes liquor in moderation.
“I was sober for seven years, and then I got back off the wagon — in a more restrained manner,” Pitt said. “I got overconfident a couple of times, went, ‘Yep, nope, not good for me, not in big quantities.’”
He went on to say that he could now have a “few” glasses of wine, but not a lot: “I have to be professional about it.”
Another incentive for the Fight Club actor to limit liquor consumption is that he now finds mornings “interesting,” and prefers not to waste them by drinking too much the night before and waking up late, hungover.
It is not clear whether D’Agostino turned down the wine, but the pair settled for Perrier bottled water to go with the charcuterie board the Pitt had prepared.
Pitt co-owns the French winery Château Miraval in Correns, France, alongside the Perrin winemaking family.
Brad Pitt previously said he was open and eager about attending AA meetings
While Pitt mostly kept quiet about the plane incident and the subsequent estrangement from his children, he said in a 2017 GQ interview that he had to “take a step away for a minute” from drinking, as he didn’t want to “live that way anymore.”
Since then, he has been open about his struggles with drinking, as well as his substance misuse habits from a very young age.
In 2020, he publicly thanked fellow actor Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober while accepting an award from him at the National Board of Review Annual Awards Gala: “I got sober because of this guy, and every day has been happier ever since.”
In 2022, he told GQ that he had been attending a “really private and selective” AA meeting to support him on his journey. He also said that he had quit tobacco.
In 2025, he spoke more about it on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert.
“I was pretty much on my knees, and I was really open,” Pitt told Shepard, who himself has been open about his struggles with substance use and sobriety.
“I was trying anything and everyone — anything anyone threw at me. It was a difficult time. I needed rebooting. I needed to wake the f**k up in some areas,” he said, adding that he eventually started to look forward to the meetings.
Angelina Jolie accused Brad Pitt of hurting her and their kids while drunk
Pitt and Jolie met on the set of 2005’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, began dating a couple of years later, and got married in August 2014.
Together, they shared three adopted kids, Maddox, Pax, and Zahara, and three biological kids, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne.
On September 14, 2016, Jolie and Pitt got into an alleged physical altercation on a private plane ride back home to Los Angeles from France. All six children were with them.
Jolie had filed for divorce right after this incident, and the two were declared legally single in 2019, but the formal settlement was reached in December 2024.
A heavily redacted FBI report released in 2022 revealed that Jolie had accused Pitt of grabbing her by the head, shaking her, pushing her against a wall, calling her “crazy,” and blaming her for “ruining the family.”
He had allegedly poured beer and red wine on her head, and later did the same with the children.
The Salt actress also claimed that Pitt went to attack one of their children after they called him a “pr**k.” When she intervened, he pushed her into a row of seats, hurting her back and elbow in the process.
The FBI closed the investigation in November 2016 without bringing any charges of child harm against Pitt.
Brad Pitt felt like ending everything amid his public divorce and estrangement from his children
Brad Pitt’s relationship with his six children has become increasingly strained since his 2016 split from Angelina Jolie. By 2024, reports said he had virtually no contact with his adult children, while his involvement with the younger kids was more limited.
Even though inside sources insisted at the time that Pitt was not an “absent father,” several of his adult children officially distanced themselves from him.
In 2024, Shiloh filed to remove “Pitt” from her surname and now uses only Jolie’s. In May 2026, Maddox did the same.
Zahara followed suit in June, weeks after Pitt was absent from her graduation ceremony, and Vivienne a month later in July. Knox socially uses only his mother’s, leaving Pax to be the only one still using Jolie-Pitt.
“He feels most hurt out of everything that happened with Angie [Jolie] that his children don’t want a public association with his last name,” a source told US Weekly at the time, adding that Pitt hoped for a future reconciliation.
In the Esquire interview, Pitt, who is now dating jewelry designer Ines de Ramon, confessed that the “family stuff” stemming from the divorce made him briefly think of taking his life, even though he labeled himself a “congenital optimist” otherwise.
“I’ve never been sui**dal except for one little period,” he said. “I 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.”
"The kids dropping his last name got to him." Netizens reacted to Brad Pitt breaking his sobriety after seven years
