For BradPitt, a few glasses of wine are back on the table.
The actor recently shared that, after remaining sober for seven years, he “got back off the wagon,” albeit “in a more restrained manner.”
Meaning, Pitt explained to Esquire, he can have more than one glass of wine but not “a lot.” Rather, he has “to be professional about it.”
The 62-year-old apparently found out what worked for him by trial and error, divulging that he “got overconfident a couple times, went, ‘Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.’”
But this update was in keeping with previous candid admissions Pitt has made over the years about alcohol and marijuana use, telling GQ in 2017—about six months after Angelina Jolie filed for divorce—that he “stopped everything except boozing when I started my family.”
Jolie adopted son Maddox in 2002, daughter Zaharain 2005 and son Paxin 2007—all three were subsequently adopted by Pitt—while the couple had daughter Shilohin 2006 and then twins Knoxand Vivienne in 2008.
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Brad Pitt Shares He’s No Longer Sober After Yearslong Journey
In the end, however, he was “boozing too much,” Pitt reflected, and it had “become a problem.” Once Jolie filed to end their two-year marriage—after 11 years together—he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous.
As he put it to the New York Timesin 2019, “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.”
In AA, he said, “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
When he started the program, “I was pretty much on my knees, and I was really open,” Pitt said on a June 2025 episode of Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Expertpodcast. “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.”
Though Pitt and Jolie had been considered legally single since April 2019, it took eight years for their divorce to be settled. A judge signed off in December 2024, with Pitt later characterizing the milestone to GQas, “Just something coming to fruition. Legally.”
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But perhaps he raised a glass of his favorite vintage in celebration.
Pitt, who still has a stake in the Château Miraval winery he used to own with Jolie, had foreshadowed in 2017 that he may not have given up drinking forever.
“I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground,” he told GQat the time. “I had to step away for a minute.”
He has since tiptoed back into being able to, as he put it, “have a few” glasses. Read on for everything else Pitt has said over the years about alcohol, substances and sobriety:
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He was drinking again, but “in a more restrained manner,” he explained. “I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”
So, when asked if he could have a glass of wine, the Oscar winner clarified, “Yeah. Well…I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.”
Though admittedly “shy” to speak up at first, Pitt recalled, “I was pretty much on my knees, and I was really open. 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— up in some areas. And it just meant a lot to me.”
Eventually, he said, meetings were “something I’d look forward to.”
Asked if he found it “necessary” to quit drinking altogether, Pitt said, “To some degree, yes.”
“You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” he said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself…It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There’s great value in that.”
“But even this last year, you know—things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem,” he added. “And I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again. I think that’s part of the human challenge: You either deny them all of your life or you answer them and evolve.”
When asked if he missed drinking, he said, “I mean, we have a winery. I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground. I had to step away for a minute. And truthfully I could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional. I was good.”
He added, “Don’t want to live that way anymore.”
Pitt also noted that he’d replaced alcohol with “cranberry juice and fizzy water,” joking, “I’ve got the cleanest urinary tract in all of L.A., I guarantee you!”
But after a trip to Morocco, where he witnessed “extreme poverty” and other social injustices, he “just quit.”
“I stopped grass then—I mean, pretty much,” Pitt recalled, “and decided to get off the couch.”
When he got called out for what critics perceived to be a jab at Aniston, Pitt said in a statement to E! News afterward, “It grieves me that this was interpreted this way. Jen is an incredibly giving, loving, and hilarious woman who remains my friend. It is an important relationship I value greatly. The point I was trying to make is not that Jen was dull, but that I was becoming dull to myself—and that, I am responsible for.”
“I’m two credits short of graduating college. Two credits,” he told Esquire in 2013. “All I had to do was write a paper. What kind of guy is that? That guy scares me—the guy who always leaves a little on his plate. For a long time, I thought I did too much damage—drug damage. I was a bit of a drifter. A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired. I followed that other thing. I spent years f–king off. But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity. It was a conscious change.”
