Brad Pitt

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Brad Pitt

The news that Ryan Gosling is planning to retire from Hollywood soon ("I'll make movies until I make babies") was greeted with a sense of disappointment by those who have seen the 31-year-old Canadian deliver a number of superb performances in 2011. The more recent revelation that Brad Pitt will follow Gosling into retirement over the next couple of years, however, was greeted with disbelief across the entertainment world and occupied space on many a front page. Gosling is a star in the making but Brad Pitt has been the epitome of a movie star since he first introduced himself to both Geena Davis and an unsuspecting public in THAT scene from Thelma & Louise 20 years ago, in a role for which the young George Clooney unsuccessfully auditioned five times, trivia fans.

Since then, Pitt has managed to combine pretty-boy fare (Troy, Meet Joe Black, Ocean's Eleven) with cool, cult offerings (Fight Club, Se7en, Inglourious Basterds), all the while maintaining his position at the top of the A-list. Off-screen, the 47-year-old has been A-list material, too, courtesy of high-profile liaisons with the likes of Juliette Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and of course, current partner, Angelina Jolie.

Any thoughts that the Pittster might be retiring because he is losing his lustre as he approaches his 50th birthday are quickly dispelled when he walks into a hotel room. Tall, lean and wearing a lime green jumper, chinos and sneakers, the Oklahoma-born actor could easily pass for a guy in his 30s (despite a wispy Catweazle beard) and that impish smile is never far from his face.

Brad is doing the rounds to promote his latest film, Moneyball, the true story of Oakland A baseball coach Billy Beane, who managed to achieve a level of success for his team, not by splashing the cash but by working out a system to get the most from less heralded players. Co-starring Jonah Hill, it offers Pitt one of the strongest acting roles of his career and gives him a real shot at his third Oscar nod (following Twelve Monkeys and Benjamin Button) next February. Moneyball is actually less about the sport of baseball then the business of baseball, which is just as well, given that the actor himself is not a particular fan of 'America's Pastime'.

"I knew, really, very little about baseball", laughs the actor, "besides taking one in the face when I was in junior high. Eighteen stitches was the result of that incident. This scar here. I like to play ball with my boys, throw the ball around, these kind of things. I didn't spend a lot of time watching the sport. But I became obsessed with this book that was about these guys questioning a system and going up against a system and what that took.

What the film is ultimately about is how we place value on people and value systems in a society which then informs how we value ourselves. What's a winner, what's a loser? These kind of themes are universal."

Brad Pitt's early performance in A River Runs Through It (1992) reminded everybody of a younger version of the director of that film, Robert Redford. That parallel is even more striking here as Pitt takes on a sporting topic which has inevitable echoes of a Redford film which just happens to be Pitt's favourite baseball flick. "I think the penultimate baseball movie is probably The Natural", says the actor.

"I would say it has the most iconic moments. There are victories that are splashed across the headlines, being carried off on the shoulders of your teammates, but there's also such a thing as the quiet victory, the personal victory that only you and you alone experience. And that's enough. And there was a quality to the story I was always drawn to."

There's no doubt that Pitt was drawn to the business end of the story, too. Talk of his retirement in front of the camera has been directly linked to his activities behind it. And he has been very active behind the camera. "Again it comes down to value", he says, "and if I'm going to invest time into something, what can I bring to it? For me, on the producer end, it's been more about getting stories across that may have a more difficult time seeing the light of day."

As the main man behind Plan B productions, a company he co-founded in 2002 with then partner Jennifer Aniston (before taking sole ownership in 2006), Pitt has used his influence to ensure that some compelling projects have seen the light of day, including Running with Scissors (2006), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Kick-Ass (2010). He has a few interesting ones in the pipeline, too, including zombie flick, World War Z. Perhaps it's a shape of things to come in Hollywood that the two producers in a bidding war for the rights to bring World War Z to the screen were chaps called Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Should Pitt hang up his acting shoes when he reaches the grand old age of 50, there will be a certain wailing and gnashing of teeth, notably among the female moviegoing community. On the other hand, the quality control demonstrated by Pitt the Actor over the years suggests that the movies delivered by Pitt the Producer will be worth the wait. Watch this space.

Michael Doherty