Brad Pitt shared that he’s “never had a gay experience,” and at 61, joked that he “kinda missed that window.”
While chatting with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the Armchair Expert podcast, Pitt casually brought it up, prompting Shepard to joke about the possibility of a spark between them.
“Given the way you and I met, does it make you nervous—,” Shepard began, and Pitt quickly cut in with a laugh, “Sexually, you mean?”
“Oh, he wishes!” Padman chimed in.
“That’s hopefully where it ends!” Shepard joked back.
Pitt kept the laughs going, saying, “You know, I’ve never had a gay experience. I kinda missed that window. But if I did… it wouldn’t be with you.” He added with a grin that Shepard might rank “maybe 14th or 15th.”
The conversation also took a more reflective turn as Shepard and Pitt recalled meeting for the first time years ago at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.
“Does it make you nervous to have to talk with me in public?” Shepard asked.
“No, not at all. Quite at ease,” Pitt replied. “We can say men’s group, right?”
“I was going to say AA,” Shepard responded. “You’re not supposed to say it, but I say it.”
Pitt spoke candidly about the impact AA had on him during his early sobriety journey. “It was AA. It was when I was first getting sober. I just thought it was just incredible,” he said. “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.”
At one point, Pitt shared a memory from his childhood when, during a desperate scuffle, he grabbed another boy by the testicles. Shepard questioned whether the move worked because of the action itself or because of underlying homophobia.
Pitt then opened up about growing up in a culture where homophobic slurs were commonly used, reflecting the hypermasculinity of the time.
“Don’t cry. Don’t be gay. ‘You f**.’ That kind of stuff. A lot of that,” he recalled. “That was that era—that error, but era.”
