"It still haunts me" - Brad Pitt talks about 'nearly' getting fired from his first movie

Brad Pitt is recalling his early days in the acting industry—and how he was almost fired from his first gig as an extra.

The F1 actor sat down for an interview with his friend, Dax Shepherd, and co-host Monica Padman, on the Armchair Expert, where he reflected on his forthcoming racing movie. However, the Oscar winner also recounted an instance when he appeared as a waiter in the 1987 movie No Man's Land.

"It's a restaurant scene. The main characters are Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney, and a bunch of other actors that I wasn't necessarily aware of. I am the waiter. I'm supposed to bring up champagne and pour champagne. They show me how to do it. You gotta pour. You spin. You wipe the thing," he revealed.

Brad Pitt then explained that he was trying to nab a SAG card by improvising.

"The whole game was, how do you get your SAG card? Because you can't get a job if you don't have your SAG card, but you can't get your SAG card unless you've had a job. It's this catch-22." He added, "Like a jackass, they're doing the scene. I get to the last actor – and she seemed lower on the totem pole? Maybe? And, literally, the scene is going on, I pour her champagne and I go, 'Would you like anything else?' It was 'CUT! CUT! CUT!' The first AD runs over, 'You do that again, you're out of here!!!' It was just a shame for the rest of the night."

Decades later, the debacle continues to "haunt" him, though he's proud that he "took a shot."

Brad Pitt opens up about nearly quitting Hollywood, his decades-long career, and more:

Brad Pitt, 61, has been doing a promo run for F1. In a recent interview with E! News, he revealed that he had some words of advice for his juvenile self—to "trust your voice."

"Don't sweat it, bro. Trust yourself. Really, just trust that voice. So many things I agonised that were just a waste of time, I agonised over in the early years. Really, just trust your voice," he told the outlet.

In the same interview, Brad Pitt told Dax Shepherd that he almost "checked out" of Hollywood altogether back when his work schedule was rather idyllic. In the summer of 1994, when Pitt had yet to break out as an actor, he would spend his days wasting away, he says.

“I would wake up, I would get a bong load, I would have four Coca-Colas on ice, no food. This particular summer, I watched the O.J. trial, and I was just trying to figure out, ‘What do I do next? What do I do next?’” per Variety.

His manager eventually forwarded the script of Se7en to him, and the rest is history.

“My dear friend and manager and, basically my sister now, Cynthia, sends [the ‘Se7en’ script] over,” Pitt recalled. “She says, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ I read the first seven pages, I call her up, I go, ‘Are you kidding me? The cliche old cop wants out, the young cop comes in and he’s looking at his high school football trophies?’ She goes, ‘Just finish it.’ Then I go meet with Finch, and he was just talking about films like I’d never heard anyone speak about film. I just got the jones back. Finding that thing kind of… it just reinvigorated what I wanted out of this thing,” reported Variety.

The 1995 film is now a defining moment of director David Fincher's career. It stars Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and John C. McGinley alongside Brad Pitt.

In his interview with Variety, Brad Pitt reflected on the trajectory of his career since then and how it mirrors the shifting trends of the film industry:

"It's gone through so many incarnations in the sense of, when the '90s came in it was all about independent cinema and getting back to this '70s kind of filmmaking," he said. "Then we saw in the 00s, the blockbuster was emerging again, and then streamers came on and just changed everything all over again. The cool thing about it is, there's just more and more people getting opportunities. This pool of talented people always existed."

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Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes in F1, the sports drama film directed by Joseph Kosinski. It stars Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem, among others. The film made its debut on June 16, 2025, at Radio City Music Hall in NYC and is expected to roll onto the big screens on June 27.

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