Brad Pitt on "W" Magazine cover for February 2009 issue

It wasn’t too long ago that Brad Pitt shared his own personal photos of his family in the pages of W magazine for all of us to see. Intimate pictures of Angelina Jolie and their children made people swoon.

Now W has gone back to Brad again – he is on the cover of their February 2009 issue! The article starts off by detailing how Brad’s insane fame level is so high that his security needs – basement entrances and hidden service elevators – rival those of high-profile politicians. He tries so hard to live a normal life with Angie and the kids, but seriously, it must be so weird to be Brad Pitt. I particularly thought it was funny when the article mentions that he called room service to order some coffee and said that he was in the penthouse, “I think”. Not only did fans and guests not know where Brad was – BRAD didn’t know where Brad was!

The article goes on to talk about how Brad resisted the role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for quite some time before finally taking it on. They move next to personal topics, and apparently Brad was very open about Angelina Jolie and their children – he referred to the family as “this cuckoo’s nest that we got going on over there.”

And here’s something that fans have been waiting to hear for awhile – after all the media back and forth what with “Angelina said this about the relationship” and the “Jennifer Aniston said that about the Jolie-Pitt family” and the neverending circus, someone asked Brad about Jennifer’s “uncool” remark and he responded.

In November Jennifer Aniston told a journalist that an earlier comment from Jolie—that she and Pitt fell in love on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and so the film “might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe”—was “uncool,” because Aniston and Pitt were still married during filming. “Listen, man, Jen is a sweetheart,” Pitt says, as if to settle this thing once and for all. “I think she got dragged into that one, and then there’s a second round to all of that Angie versus Jen. It’s so created.” Of his current relationship with Aniston, he says, “We still check in with each other. She was a big part of my life, and me hers. I don’t see how there cannot be [that]. That’s life, man. That’s life.”

The media has exaggerated things and kept it dragged out for so long? What a shock! Not. It sure sounds like a lot of drama has been created where there really is none. Of course, Jolie-Pitt haters will jump on that and have a field day, but hopefully they’ll continue to read the article long enough to get to the part where Brad equally defends Angelina:

A few sentences into the next topic, though, Pitt circles back to defend Jolie’s honor. “What people don’t understand is that we filmed [Mr. & Mrs. Smith] for a year,” he explains. “We were still filming after Jen and I split up. Even then it doesn’t mean that there was some kind of dastardly affair. There wasn’t. I’m very proud of the way that it was handled. It was respectful. [The film] will mean something to our kids. It will, that’s all.”

Hopefully that can give a bit of a rest to the constant cacaphony of comments that they got together while Jennifer was blissfully unaware that the marriage was ending.

Moving on from there, the article shifts to the good work that Brad and others with whom he aligns himself (like Angelina, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle) do for the world.

The article describes his well-known work with Make It Right as well as his contribution to the campaign against California’s Proposition 8. When asked about his fight for gay marriage rights, ever eloquent, Brad had this to say:

“People who are against gay marriage do not understand the very freedoms that they themselves are enjoying,” he argues. “What if someone said, ‘Sorry, no Christianity here? No Judaism. Certainly no Mormons.’ No one would stand for that, and I wouldn’t allow anyone to say that either. I’d fight them in the same way.”

There’s also a nice long and interesting section where the article discusses the changes that went into the script of Benjamin Button and how Brad didn’t want a movie role where he didn’t really do anything or have any effect on the scenes. It’s interesting to know that this movie was ten years in the making what with script and director changes.

Possibly the most hilarious part of the article is when Tilda Swinton is outed as having a perverted sense of humor, something that came about due to a bit of boredom:

During a particularly long shoot for a voiceover montage, their gamesmanship took, as Swinton puts it, “diabolically obscene turns,” such as when she arranged a prop carrot and two potatoes into a “vast vegetable genitalia,” and Pitt dared her to leave it in the shot. “Not a soul noticed,” adds Swinton. Sadly, the sculpture didn’t make final print; Swinton and Pitt later confessed to Fincher, which Swinton says she now regrets.

The article ends with Brad excusing himself because he needs to get back to Angelina, his kids, and his parents, all of whom were going to have dinner together. As for how he would get past the fans and paparazzi outside?

“This is my anonymity,” he says, brandishing the motorcycle helmet in an upraised hand before he breezes out the door. “With it, I’m just another a–hole on the streets.”

Image used with permission: Newscom