Brad Pitt reveals he started drinking again after seven years sober

Brad Pitt has confirmed he has resumed drinking alcohol, ending a seven-year stretch of sobriety, though he says he now keeps a tight rein on how much he consumes.

The 62-year-old actor made the admission during an Esquire interview after pouring the interviewer a glass of wine, which led to a question about whether he kept alcohol around purely for company. Pitt responded: "No, I got — I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon," before adding: "In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, 'Yep, nope, not good for me.' Not in big quantities."

When pressed on what that looked like day to day, Pitt said: "I can have a few glasses of wine. But I can't have a lot. I have to be professional about it."

Pitt's history with substance uses dates back to a 2017 GQ interview, where he admitted he hadn't gone a single day sober since his college years, cycling through alcohol, marijuana and other substances. Two years later, he told The New York Times he had joined an all-male Alcoholics Anonymous group for eighteen months, a decision that traced back to 2016, around the period Angelina Jolie filed for divorce.

Speaking on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard in 2025, Pitt reflected warmly on his time in recovery meetings, calling them an "amazing thing" and praising the honesty he found there: "I just thought it was just incredible men sharing their experiences, their foibles, their missteps, their wants, their aches, and a lot of humor with it." He admitted he had felt "shy" walking into his first sessions, recalling a period when he was "pretty much on my knees" but forced himself to stay "really open."

The interview also touched on Pitt's next project — reprising stuntman Cliff Booth for Netflix's The Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher and written by Quentin Tarantino. Rather than a conventional follow-up, Pitt framed the film as closer to a run of connected TV-style episodes. It's due for a two-week Imax-only run starting November 25 ahead of its Netflix debut on December 23.