Everything Brad Pitt Has Said About His Sobriety Journey

"Back Off the Wagon"

After being "sober for seven years," Brad Pitt told Esquire in an interview published Aug. 10, 2026, he "got back off the wagon."

He was drinking again, but "in a more restrained manner," he explained. "I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”

So, when asked if he could have a glass of wine, the Oscar winner clarified, "Yeah. Well...I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it."

AA Was a "Special Experience"

“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," Pitt said about AA on a June 2025 episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast. "I thought it was a really special experience."

Though admittedly "shy" to speak up at first, Pitt recalled, “I was pretty much on my knees, and I was really open. 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.”

Eventually, he said, meetings were "something I'd look forward to."

Why Brad Pitt Quit Drinking

In a December 2019 Interview magazine chat with his Legends of the Fall and Meet Joe Black co-star Anthony Hopkins, Pitt shared that he came to view alcohol "as a disservice to myself, as an escape."

Asked if he found it "necessary" to quit drinking altogether, Pitt said, "To some degree, yes."

Taking the First Step With AA

"I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges," Pitt told The New York Times in 2019 about entering Alcoholics Anonymous after Angelina Jolie filed for divorce in September 2016.

"You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard," he said. "It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself...It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There's great value in that."

Quitting Everything Except Booze, but Then "Boozing Too Much"

"I can't remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn't boozing or had a spliff, or something. Something," Pitt told GQ Style in 2017, about six months after Jolie filed for divorce. "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. I was boozing too much. It's just become a problem," he added. "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. I think that's part of the human challenge: You either deny them all of your life or you answer them and evolve."

"Back in my stoner days, I wanted to smoke a joint with Jack and Snoop and Willie," Pitt told GQ Style. "You know, when you're a stoner, you get these really stupid ideas. Well, I don't want to indict the others, but I haven't made it to Willie yet."

When asked if he missed drinking, he said, "I mean, we have a winery. I enjoy wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground. I had to step away for a minute. And truthfully I could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional. I was good."

He added, "Don't want to live that way anymore."

Pitt also noted that he'd replaced alcohol with "cranberry juice and fizzy water," joking, "I've got the cleanest urinary tract in all of L.A., I guarantee you!"

What Got Him Off the Couch

"I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s," Pitt told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012. "I was hiding out from the celebrity thing; I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut; and I really got irritated with myself. I got to: 'What's the point? I know better than this.'"

But after a trip to Morocco, where he witnessed "extreme poverty" and other social injustices, he "just quit."

"I stopped grass then—I mean, pretty much," Pitt recalled, "and decided to get off the couch."

Pitt said he dropped out of college not least due to his once-avid marijuana use. 

"I'm two credits short of graduating college. Two credits," he told Esquire in 2013. "All I had to do was write a paper. What kind of guy is that? That guy scares me—the guy who always leaves a little on his plate. For a long time, I thought I did too much damage—drug damage. I was a bit of a drifter. A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired. I followed that other thing. I spent years f--king off. But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity. It was a conscious change."

"Becoming Dull to Myself"

"I spent the '90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony," Pitt told Parade magazine in 2011. "I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn't living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to Jennifer Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn't."

When he got called out for what critics perceived to be a jab at Aniston, Pitt said in a statement to E! News afterward, "It grieves me that this was interpreted this way. Jen is an incredibly giving, loving, and hilarious woman who remains my friend.  It is an important relationship I value greatly. The point I was trying to make is not that Jen was dull, but that I was becoming dull to myself—and that, I am responsible for."