Brad Pitt Reveals He’s No Longer Sober After 7 Years, Admits He ‘Got Overconfident a Couple Times’

Brad Pitt is opening up about his ever-changing relationship with alcohol.

“I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon,” the movie star, 62, told Esquire in an interview published Monday, August 10. “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”

The interviewer stated, “You can have a glass of wine,” to which Pitt explained he still needs to be careful: “Yeah. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.”

The two-time Oscar winner first talked about his sobriety in a May 2017 interview with GQ magazine, about eight months after then-wife Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from him in September 2016.

“I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something,” he confessed at the time. “And you realize that a lot of it is, um — cigarettes, you know, pacifiers. And I’m running from feelings. I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that.”

“I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know — things I wasn’t dealing with,” Pitt continued to GQ. “I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem. 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.”

Jolie, 51, filed for divorce after an incident with Pitt and their children — Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and 18-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne — on a private plane, but no charges were brought against him and he was cleared after a formal investigation, according to NPR.

In 2022, more details came out from a court filing where Jolie claimed he was violent with both her and the kids and poured beer and red wine on them, per NPR. However, Pitt’s representative denied Jolie’s allegations.

Many A-listers have publicly supported the Fight Club actor along his sobriety journey.

In 2020, Bradley Cooper presented Pitt with an award at the National Board of Review Annual Awards Gala and the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star explained onstage, “I got sober because of this guy,” noting “every day’s been happier ever since.”

Pitt also struck up a friendship with Dax Shepard in an Alcoholics Anonymous men’s group, which he discussed in a June 2025 appearance on the 51-year-old comedian’s Armchair Expert podcast. The F1 actor recalled how he was “really open” to trying “anything anyone threw at” him to get better.

“It was a particularly difficult time,” Pitt remembered. “I needed rebooting. I needed to wake the [expletive] up in some areas.”