Maybe that Brad Pitt profile wasn't so bad?

Plus: what to read, watch and listen to, and what to avoid

The other day I was talking to a colleague about GQ’s recent Brad Pitt profile – the one which was excoriated by journalists on Twitter and used to justify yet another gloomy sermon on the demise of the celebrity profile (she says while writing yet another newsletter about just that).

Written by the author Ottessa Moshfegh, the piece read to me like the kind of unhinged conversation you might overhear between a Hollywood actor and their spiritual advisor, or perhaps Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus drunkenly talking to Andie MacDowell in Maid. 

After essentially conducting a session of dream therapy together – Pitt used to have a recurring nightmare about getting stabbed – the actor then shows Moshfegh his hand-made porcelain candle-sticks with the explanation that, “if I’m not making, I’m dying in some way”, and asks her: ““why the fuck are we here? What’s beyond? …Do you feel trapped here, in this body and in this environment?”

Moshfegh then goes on to recite a Rumi poem after finding a line of Rumi’s poetry tattooed beneath Pitt’s shirt before they both muse about their broken hearts and sit in symbolic silence. A silence which, according to Moshfegh, ​​”is especially dramatic when Brad Pitt is creating it.”

The piece is full of such hilarious moments of overblown significance. Pitt is dressed in khaki, “like a man trying to camouflage himself in a wheat field.” When Pitt describes his hobby making ceramics as a “quiet, tactile sport” (I really snorted at this point), I can almost picture Moshfegh closing her eyes in admiration, as she senses his “Ozarkian humility coming through.”

To steal a quote from Mic Wright’s witheringly funny takedown of the piece in his excellent newsletter Conquest of the Useless: “Other things that are not interesting include that Brad Pitt likes to get up early to play the guitar, that he consumes nicotine mints, and that he enjoys his beach house.”

Mic’s particular bugbear was glossing over Pitt’s messy divorce. “By dodging what’s actually happening in Pitt’s life,” he writes, “Moshfegh and her editors don’t just ignore the elephant in the room but try to persuade the reader that all the dung is just more of his wonderful art.”

Anyway, as you can tell I thought it was an absurd piece. In fact after reading it I spent about 10 minutes mindlessly fantasising about what would happen had I ever filed such a thing to an editor. I actually think my editor would have signed me off sick.

But my colleague, who is an excellent editor and journalist, thought the profile was brilliant. For starters, he believed that Moshfegh was actually being ironic. She is, after all, the author of the highly provocative and violent new book Lapvona, which has also been ripped apart by critics for being tastelessly violent, featuring images of incest, mutilation and cannibalism. Hardly the same style as this woo-woo profile. (Perhaps, that line about the field of wheat is in fact be a winking barb comparing Brad Pitt to Theresa May!)

And even if she wasn’t being ironic, he said, wasn’t this the most interesting Brad Pitt profile we had ever read? Had we ever heard Pitt talk about anything like this before? Was this not, in fact, a revival of the celebrity profile? Yes, he comes across as if he might still be on a mushroom trip he thought he’d returned from five years ago, but how is that not entertaining? Would I honestly rather read another profile in which he talks about how his childhood inspired a burning desire to “be someone else”, how it feels to be “America’s leading man” and whether he knew Weinstein was evil? Well he had me there. 

I guess rule 101 with profiles is to have distance from the subject, so that you don’t take everything they say at face value without questioning it. Certainly, on that level, this profile fails on all counts. But then again, I don’t know how nice it would be to read someone making fun of Pitt as he says all these mad, earnest things. And frankly, had the interviewer not been on his level, he probably wouldn’t have said half of it anyway. 

Anyway, maybe I’m mellowing with age. Or maybe the sun has gone to my head. I’d love to know what you all thought of the profile either way. And if you, like me, hated it on reflex, then go back and have another read – you might come round to it in strange new ways.

This month in links

If you want to hear more of my witterings about celebrity journalism, then have a listen to my new Straight Up podcast episode with fellow journo and fab friend Kathleen Johnston, with whom I worked at GQ. Not only do we reveal some of our career’s most embarrassing moments, but we spill the tea on our interviews in which we faced the biggest divas and most terrifying PRs. I also tell my favourite story – which involved Catfish and the Bottlemen, Royal Mail and my former housemate.

Speaking of celebrity profiles, another GQ one I enjoyed straight away and without remorse was Chris Mandle’s very moving chat with Paapa Essiedu.

Another podcast recommendation: Rolling Stone Now on Drake’s new house album, which, while slated by many, is praised here as yet more evidence of Drake’s career-long experimentation with genre. The episode on Kendrick’s Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, which hosts Kendrick’s biographer, is also fascinating for a similarly against-the-grain, but this time highly critical, review of the album.

Next time you are eating lunch al desko, you absolutely must read Anne Helen’s Peterson’s piece on The Case For Lunch in her Culture Study newsletter, about the history of France’s indulgence for a long luncheon. Until recently, it was illegal to eat lunch at your desk in France, a law which began in 1894 so that the workplaces of labourers could be fumigated of chemical toxins. 

When I went to Paris for my year abroad, I was in awe of my friends who were given little lunch tokens by their workplaces to exchange at neighbourhood restaurants for a two or three course menu (I was a teacher so we were offered a free canteen). Some of my friends even had the odd glass of wine. Until the pandemic, 50 per cent of workers in France ate lunch out, and the average lunch lasted a full hour. Incroyable. 

If you require a moment of light relief this weekend, make it Lara Prendergast’s stinging takedown of the sex party bore. Apparently sex parties have become so ubiquitous among the middle classes that no one finds it interesting, or hot, to hear about them anymore. 

Also, Jo Elvin’s extremely juicy read on the magazine editors’ rat race to fashion week’s front row, which reveals how vital sitting on the frow is for good business – not just image.

I really enjoyed commissioning Harriet Marsden on the wild true story behind Apple TV’s very good new show Black Bird, starring Taron Egerton as a busted drug dealer who is tapped by the FBI to go undercover in America’s most notorious prison for the criminally insane. If he befriends the serial killer Larry Hall and finds out where he buried the bodies of his 30 suspected victims, he’ll get his freedom. Paul Walter Hauser as Hall, with a creepy high-pitched voice, is utterly terrifying.

Much less good is the corny AF adaptation of magical book Where the Crawdad’s Sing, which I saw a screening of earlier this week. Daisy Edgar Jones does the best she can in dire circumstances, but truly this is the most boiler plate and unimaginative adaptation of a book I have seen in a long time. The film is also full of sinfully cheesy scenes which do the much more intelligent and dark tones of the book no justice. As my colleague Robbie Collin says: honestly, the crawdads were better off without it.

Lastly, I can’t stop thinking about the blue waters of Lake Geneva at Montreux Jazz Festival, where I went last weekend for the Telegraph. Many of the stages are dotted on the lake’s shoreline, and one evening I had a takeaway meal sitting by the water at dusk, with the snowy Swiss alps framing what looked like the prettiest postcard ever. Regardless of the jazz festival, I highly recommend a trip to Montreux. And if you go in summer, make a trip to the little village of Vevey, where every Saturday morning from 10-1pm an army of local pensioners serve unlimited goblets of local wine for just 13 francs, while locals of a similar vintage also play enormous alphorns. Heaven!

Thanks for reading Pass the Aux! Say hello on Twitter @eleanorhalls1 or send me an email eleanorahalls@gmail.com.

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