Brad Pitt Says He's Drinking Again. He Was Sober for Seven Years.
Brad Pitt offered his Esquire interviewer a glass of wine at his Los Angeles home. The reporter asked if it was only for guests. "No, I got - I was sober for seven years," Pitt said. "And then I got back off the wagon."
The admission came in a wide-ranging profile published Monday, Pitt's first extended interview to address his drinking since he got sober in 2016 following his split from Angelina Jolie. He was careful to frame what's changed: "In a more restrained manner," he said of his current relationship with alcohol. "I got overconfident a couple times, went, 'Yep, nope, not good for me.' Not in big quantities. I have to be professional about it." Asked what that looks like day to day, Pitt, 62, said he can have a few glasses of wine but draws a hard line before it becomes more than that.
Pitt has spoken publicly about his sobriety before - in a 2019 New York Times profile, and again on Dax Shepard's "Armchair Expert" podcast in 2025, where he described joining a 12-step program "pretty much on my knees." He's credited actor Bradley Cooper with helping inspire the decision. What's new in the Esquire interview is the acknowledgment that the seven-year run has ended, and Pitt's own characterization of what replaced it: moderation rather than total abstinence, held together, in his words, by professional discipline rather than the all-or-nothing framework of the program that got him there.
The interview also revisited how difficult the period around his 2016 split from Jolie became. Pitt described a stretch when the pain of losing contact with his children felt overwhelming enough that he understood, in the moment, why some people see suicide as a form of relief - though he was clear he never intended to act on it. He called himself a "congenital optimist" in the same conversation, and the through-line of the piece is recovery rather than crisis: five of his six children have since dropped "Pitt" from their names publicly, an estrangement he's said he hopes to eventually repair, and he's currently dating jewelry designer Ines de Ramon.
None of what Pitt described changes the basic facts of his public timeline. He got sober after the 2016 incident that led to Jolie's divorce filing. He remained sober for seven years. He is now drinking again, by his own account in smaller amounts and with more caution than before. Those are Pitt's own words, delivered directly, not claims relayed by a source or an unnamed insider.
Esquire's profile arrives as Pitt continues promoting "F1," this year's racing drama that became one of his more commercially successful films in years. The interview doesn't mention whether the sobriety shift affects his other current projects, and Pitt didn't elaborate further on what "professional" drinking means in practice beyond the boundaries he described.
