Brad Pitt is looking at the new generation of actors with a mix of admiration and relief, and he’s admitting his own era carried a different kind of baggage.
On the July 2 episode of the New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce podcast, Pitt said actors from his generation were “a little more uptight” about what it meant to be “serious” about the craft. In his words, there was a strong unspoken rule: “You didn’t sell out.” He contrasted that mindset with younger actors today, who he thinks seem freer to move between different kinds of work, and to enjoy it more.
Pitt’s point wasn’t that older actors were “better,” but that the culture around acting felt stricter. He described today’s landscape as one where performers can treat creativity as something that can show up in many places, film, TV, streaming, even different genres, without it automatically being seen as a compromise.
But he also had a warning for anyone starting out now: don’t get obsessed with the idea that you must lock down a superhero role or lead a massive franchise to matter. Pitt said younger actors can get “caught up” in feeling pressure to “have a franchise” or “have a superhero,” and he’s basically telling them to resist the trap. In the interview, he bluntly joked, “Don’t! Don’t! They’ll die,” referring to how exhausting and consuming those long-term blockbuster commitments can become.
That advice lines up with how Pitt’s own career has played out. He’s done sequels and recurring characters, but he hasn’t built his identity around superhero universes — and the reporting around the podcast notes his franchise footprint is relatively light compared with many modern A-listers (aside from things like the Ocean’s films, plus a brief Deadpool 2 cameo).
The comments arrived while Pitt is promoting F1, his big racing film, and they land like a veteran’s reality check: Hollywood used to punish actors socially for “selling out,” and now it sometimes pressures them commercially to do the opposite, chase the biggest branded roles possible. Pitt’s takeaway is that the healthiest path is probably neither extreme: stay open, make things you actually want to make, and don’t let the industry force you into a single lane.
