Brad Pitt Says He Is Drinking Again After Seven Years of Sobriety

Brad Pitt has revealed that he is drinking again after seven years of sobriety, in an interview with Esquire published on 10 August 2026.

"I was sober for seven years," Pitt told the magazine, laughing. "And then I got back off the wagon." The 62-year-old actor said he now drinks in what he called a "more restrained manner" — a few glasses of wine, but not a lot. "I have to be professional about it," he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

Pitt's relationship with alcohol has been part of his public story for nearly a decade. In a 2017 GQ interview, he said he could not remember a day since leaving college when he was not drinking, smoking pot, or using something. Two years later, in 2019, he told The New York Times he spent a year and a half in an all-male recovery group in Alcoholics Anonymous. At the National Board of Review gala in January 2020, he publicly thanked Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober — a moment that played out on stage as Pitt accepted an award for his performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (THR).

The Esquire profile, titled "A Monday with Brad Pitt," was published on both the US and UK editions of the magazine's website. Page Six and E! Online independently reported the sobriety disclosure on the same day (Page Six; E! Online).

The interview arrives as Pitt prepares for the release of The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a Netflix film that reunites him with director David Fincher, from a script by Quentin Tarantino. Pitt reprises his role as Cliff Booth, the laid-back stuntman he played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He described the new film as playing "more like a series of episodic TV segments strung together" than a conventional sequel, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

Netflix is giving the film an unusual release pattern for a streaming title. The Adventures of Cliff Booth will open on 25 November as an Imax exclusive for two weeks — a theatrical window in the biggest-format cinemas — before debuting on the Netflix platform on 23 December (THR).

For a star who once said he could not recall a single sober day after college, the new chapter is candidly matter-of-fact. No apology, no grand declaration — just a man who put the bottle down for seven years and now picks it up now and then, on his own terms.