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Thu 21 August 2025 17:45, UK
Every successful actor has made at least one movie they actively hate, and anyone who says there’s no such black mark on their filmography is lying. For the last 30 years, actors haven’t come much more successful than Brad Pitt, which inevitably means he’s got a few regrets.
Admittedly, most of them come from the earliest days of his career, long before he was a heartthrob, sex symbol, leading man, and most recently, a character actor masquerading as a movie star. Slumming thespians need to go where the work is, with Pitt pushed in several directions he didn’t want to go.
His first leading role in Dark Side of the Sun was “devoid of entertainment value,” according to him, while his first slasher flick, Cutting Class, became inspirational in a weird way because Pitt used it as the barometer of how anyone with enough talent and determination can wade through a sea of filmic shit and emerge on the other side smelling of roses.
He didn’t enjoy the experience of headlining Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy either, but it was still seen as a positive because he used the blockbuster as the impetus to shy away from mass-market entertainment in favour of focusing on stories, characters, and filmmakers that appealed to him.
Pitt wasn’t thrilled with The Devil’s Own, thought he was terrible in A River Runs Through It, and claimed he was woefully miscast in Meet Joe Black. Clearly, the two-time Academy Award winner has no issues dragging his name or the names of his past pictures through the mud, so it’s no surprise he hated Legends of the Fall from the second he laid eyes on it.
Before shooting had started, he claimed he was “the best guy” to play Tristan Ludlow in Edward Zwick’s sweeping period piece, but things quickly soured. Pitt’s dissatisfaction was apparent from the first table read, and things became increasingly heated between the star and director to the point that they ended up throwing furniture at each other.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a fun time. However, those sins could be forgiven if the movie was great. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, something Pitt realised instantly. “When I showed Brad the final film, he wasn’t pleased,” Zwick told Vanity Fair. “He felt I’d underplayed his character’s madness.”
“I had, in fact, cut only a single shot from the scene where Tristan is raging with fever, screaming as the waves wash over him on the schooner,” the filmmaker explained. “But it was a shot he dearly loved, and it would have been little enough to leave it in, and I should have. Apologies, Brad.”
It was too little, too late, though. Pitt was never happy with Legends of the Fall from his first day of pre-production through to his last day on set, and while he and Zwick eventually smoothed over the tension between them, the director ultimately issued an apology. On the plus side, the film was a sizeable box office hit, which is one of the few positives to draw from an altogether miserable time for all involved.
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