Brad Pitt on attending Alcoholics Anonymous: 'I needed rebooting'
Brad Pitt is opening up about his experience attending Alcoholics Anonymous.
The actor chatted about attending an AA meeting with "Armchair Expert" host Dax Shepard in an episode of the podcast released Monday.
Pitt said attending AA was an amazing thing.
"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. I thought it was a really special experience," Pitt said.
Shepard said he wondered if Pitt was nervous to chat on the podcast with him after they had met in AA, knowing the "really heightened honesty and vulnerability" of the experience.
But Pitt told Shepard he was "quite at ease" with the decision.
While at AA, Pitt said he was shy, but felt motivated to open up because of how low he felt at the time.
"I was pretty much on my knees, and I was really open," Pitt said. "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."
After a few AA meetings, the sessions began to be "something I'd look forward to," Pitt said. The actor also said he feels he is "pretty good at taking responsibility" for and "owning up to" things he's done wrong.
"And now it's a quest to, you know, 'What do I do with this? How can I right this and make sure it doesn't happen again?'" Pitt said.
The actor, who stars in the upcoming film "F1," previously told The New York Times in 2019 that he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous after his ex-wife Angelina Jolie filed for divorce in 2016.
The two had been together for a decade and married for two years. They share six children, Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne. Pitt adopted Maddox and Zahara in 2006.
In that interview, Pitt shared how committed he was to his sobriety.
"I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges," he said at the time.
He added how "freeing" it was to open up in his recovery group, which was all men.
"It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself," he said then.
