We Owe Brad Pitt an Apology. Seriously. | The American Spectator

For three decades, Brad Pitt has been punished for the crime of being a good-looking man in an industry that mistakes handsome faces for empty heads. Critics have spent his entire career treating him like Hollywood’s most photogenic prop, as if talent and attractiveness were mutually exclusive. This intellectual snobbery has cost us proper recognition of one of cinema’s most underrated performers.

The man can actually act. Always could. But admitting this means acknowledging our own prejudices.

As an Irishman, I’ll even forgive him for that terrible accent in The Devil’s Own, where he plays an IRA gunman who sounds like he learned English from a Lucky Charms commercial (Some cinematic sins transcend nationality).

The Brad Pitt rehabilitation project begins, almost inevitably, with Fight Club. I know — every disaffected young man with a bookshelf and a grudge cites it as gospel. But that doesn’t make it any less true. While Edward Norton’s narrator does the philosophical heavy lifting, Pitt’s Tyler Durden steals the show.

He’s pure kinetic energy wrapped in a leather jacket. Pitt doesn’t just deliver Palahniuk’s anti-consumerist manifestos, he embodies them with a feral charisma that makes blowing up your IKEA catalogue look like spiritual awakening. Watch him again — really watch him — and you’ll see what so many missed in 1999: Pitt isn’t just playing cool. He’s playing the idea of cool so precisely it becomes performance art. It’s not method. It’s myth-making. And it worked so well that critics couldn’t see past the swagger.

This understanding of persona as performance would become Pitt’s secret weapon. In Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, he disappears entirely into Mickey O’Neil, a bare-knuckle boxing “pikey” — a term used, often pejoratively, for Irish Travellers — whose accent is so thick it practically demands subtitles. On paper, it’s a side role meant for comic relief or cartoon chaos. But Pitt doesn’t phone it in; he goes full throttle. His Mickey isn’t just a wild card — he’s the film’s gravitational force, unpredictable and magnetic.

It’s a weird, wiry, twitching performance full of physicality and rhythm, all built on the deliberate decision not to be understood. And somehow, that gamble works. Pitt knew exactly what Snatch required: characters turned up to 11. He calibrated Mickey to match Ritchie’s fast-cut, hyper-stylized world — and in doing so, he outshone almost everyone else on screen. It was a supporting role that should’ve been forgettable. Instead, it became unforgettable.

But it was Quentin Tarantino who truly unlocked Pitt’s potential. In Inglourious Basterds, Lieutenant Aldo Raine is pure Tennessee theatrics and testosterone, a man who speaks in italics and treats Nazi scalping like a sacred calling. Pitt leans into the absurdity without winking at the audience — a delicate balance that lesser actors would have botched. The “Bon-jorno” scene alone should have earned him an Oscar nomination, but apparently, the Academy doesn’t recognize comedic genius when it comes wearing a perfectly distressed military uniform.

Tarantino doubled down on Pitt’s talents in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, finally giving him the role that would earn long-overdue recognition. Cliff Booth is Pitt at his most effortlessly magnetic; a stuntman drifting through the twilight of the studio system with the kind of easy confidence that only comes from a man who’s survived everything Hollywood could throw at him. The performance is so naturalistic it barely feels like acting, which is precisely the point. Pitt doesn’t just inhabit Cliff; he becomes him so completely that you forget you’re watching one of the world’s most iconic actors.

The movie star versus actor debate is Hollywood’s most tired false dichotomy. Critics love to draw this distinction as if commanding the screen and inhabiting a character are somehow incompatible skills. Tell that to Cary Grant, who spent 40 years being dismissed as “just” a movie star while perfecting the most difficult acting trick of all — making it look effortless.

Or consider Tom Cruise, another victim of the beauty bias, whose commitment to craft gets overlooked because, for decades, he has dared to be both compelling and conventionally attractive. The dirty secret of cinema is that true movie stars are actually the rarest actors of all. Anyone can disappear into a role with enough prosthetics and affectation. But to maintain your essential self while becoming someone else entirely? To project authenticity through the artifice of performance? That’s the kind of high-wire act that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Pitt has mastered this impossible balance. His performance in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a master class in controlled chaos. As Jack Conrad, the silent film star watching his world crumble in the face of technological change, Pitt finds the tragedy within the comedy and the dignity within the dissolution. He’s playing a movie star undone by changing times while being, himself, a movie star adapting to an evolving industry. The meta-theatrical elements could have been catastrophic in lesser hands, but Pitt navigates them with surgical precision. It’s a performance that should have launched awards conversations, but Chazelle’s maximalist vision proved too much for mainstream audiences.

This brings us to F1, Pitt’s just-released collaboration with Joseph Kosinski, which I had the pleasure of watching. Predictably, the reviews rolled in fast. But as always, some critics still commit the cardinal sin of reviewing the myth instead of the man on screen. The Telegraph called it “Barbie for dads,” a smug, shallow take that says more about the critic than the film. Because F1 isn’t really about cars. It’s about aging gracefully in a young man’s game. About proving yourself when the world has quietly decided your best days are behind you.

Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up driver stepping back onto the grid — not out of ego, but out of something closer to existential need. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw mocked his “cherubic chops” bulging under the helmet, but even that image conceals a more poignant truth: this is a film about navigating a sport — and a culture — that fetishizes youth and disposability. Pitt doesn’t just play the veteran racer; he embodies the man who refuses to fade quietly. F1 isn’t interested in nostalgia. It’s about relevance, resilience, and the quiet, unglamorous fight to stay visible in a world eager to render you obsolete.

That struggle — between perception and reality, between surface and substance — runs through Pitt’s most compelling work. His best roles aren’t just about looking sharp; they’re about exposing the cracks beneath the image, and what happens when the myth starts to lose potency, when the mask no longer fits, and when the man beneath has to answer for who he really is. In a culture obsessed with authenticity, the American has mastered the art of authentic performance — never quite letting us forget we’re watching Brad Pitt, but somehow making that awareness part of the experience rather than a distraction from it. It’s a tightrope act few actors could pull off. And for doing it this well, for this long, he deserves a great deal of credit — and from parts of the media, an apology for spending years treating him like a mannequin with a pulse.

READ MORE from John MacGhlionn:

He Loved You More Than Life Itself — And It Killed Him

Loneliness Is the New Oil