Nachos, popcorn, sandwiches,
dumplings, peanut butter, a possibly poisoned pot roast and rat blood.
These are things that Brad
Pitt has ingested on screen over the course of his three-plus-decade career.
They are things among many things because it seems that while Brad Pitt might
not chew the scenery in his films — he’s often praised for restraint — it seems
that he’s always eating.
On YouTube, you can find
videos showing clips of Pitt, in various roles, shoveling, tossing and
otherwise cramming various foods into his mouth. There are lengthy versions like one simply titled “15 Minutes of Brad Pitt Eating,” as well as a snappier
three-minute compilation (together, these two videos have been viewed almost 1
million times).
There are supercuts
chronicling the food the actor eats in individual movies, including “Ocean’s
Eleven” and “Moneyball.” Some viewers even saw a scene in the recent Quentin
Tarantino movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” in which Pitt’s character
whips up and then devours a box of neon-hued mac and cheese, as a sly
meta-style wink to Pitt’s reputation for cinematic noshing. (Tarantino’s ode to
the end of Tinseltown’s golden era is littered with so many self-referential
touches that such a read seems plausible.)
Maybe Brad Pitt doesn’t eat
any more than any other actor out there. That’s possible, says Fabio
Parasecoli, a professor of food studies for New York University at Steinhardt
who has studied food on film (and even wrote a dissertation on men eating in blockbuster
movies). With the exception of food-focused films, such as “Chef” or “Big
Night,” he notes, most eating that goes on in movies is overlooked.
“Food is so embedded in scenes
of everyday life, so you don’t notice it – but it’s there,” he says.
When you’re hyper-focus on the
eating that’s going on your screen, he says, you might find there’s more than
you’d think. In other words, if you go looking for a particular actor eating,
you will likely find examples of it. And Pitt’s oeuvre is relatively vast,
spanning some 60 movies – and a lot of chewing.
Let’s stipulate, though, that
Pitt does eat more than your average actor. In which case, maybe it’s just time
to face it: We just like watching Brad Pitt eat.
But why?
Caroline Liem, a casting
director and professor at Pace Performing Arts, says one reason might be that
Pitt is just really, really good at on-screen eating. “He’s the Laurence
Olivier of eating!” she says.
Even talented actors sometimes
screw up what seems like a simple task, she says. They might take bites that
are too big. Or tiny bites — a dead giveaway that they’re dealing with multiple
takes. But Pitt? “He makes it look like an actual human being eating, and you
don’t get that a lot,” Liem says. “He’s just one with food.”
Some of Pitt’s eating is
central to a scene. Think of him in “Interview With the Vampire,” in which his
brooding undead Louis is trying to kick the habit of human blood and instead
chomps into rats. Or in “Meet Joe Black,” when his titular character – who is
death itself inhabiting a human body – eats peanut butter for the first time.
Other times, eating has been a
way to subtly express something about his character. As Rusty Ryan in the
Ocean’s franchise, he’s forever snacking. Pitt has described in interviews why
that was – Rusty’s a con man and always on the move, he said, so he figured he
wouldn’t have time for a proper sit-down meal. And in 2011, he told NPR’s Terry
Gross that his “Moneyball” character’s snacking was a way of showing his
intensity and “need to accomplish something.”
Liem says actors can use food
to develop their characters in ways that might not even be called for in a
script. “As a casting director, I know that an actor knows the character inside
and out – better than anyone else on set – and so if the actor says the
character needs a sandwich, he needs a sandwich,” she says.
Asked in a recent interview
about the mash-up video of his chomping, Pitt described it as just that: part
of his craft. “I like to busy myself,” he said.
Parasecoli sees the fixation
on his eating as an overlap of our collective obsession with food and
celebrities.
“Food is at the forefront of
culture,” he says. “Now, depending on where we shop, whether we’re vegan or
paleo or shop at Walmart – it’s all a sort of performance of our identity.” At
the same time, Parasecoli says, we like to see famous people doing normal human
things (which might explain why tabloids are filled with pics of
grocery-shopping stars). Pitt’s “humanity is more visible if he’s doing
something we all do,” he says.
Ultimately, perhaps we can
simply blame our brains’ ancient hard-wiring for this not-so-guilty pleasure.
After all, millions of people watch mukbang, the genre of videos depicting
people eating gut-busting quantities of food. And others tune in to videos
meant to trigger ASMR, or “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a pleasurable
sensation that can be brought on by watching people do mundane things like
drumming their fingers, brushing their hair – and eating.
Craig Richard, a professor at
Shenandoah University and the founder of ASMR University, says the experience
of watching Pitt eat is different from either of those categories, though it
can trigger the same response. “With mukbang and ASMR videos, they are meant to
relax you – so the intent isn’t there, but the effect might be,” he said.
There’s a reason watching
someone eat can be pleasurable, he says. Millions of years ago, when our
ancestors might have encountered someone who looked friendly eating in front of
them, the cues were clear: Here is a nonthreatening person in possession of food
that is demonstrably edible. “When you see that, that is reason to switch your
brain from fight-or-flight to a calm state,” he says.
And maybe it’s just that we .
. . you know, like to watch hot people do stuff? Blame science for that, too.
Richard described experiments where even infants trained their gaze longer on
certain people: “We do seem to be hard-wired to prefer to stare at people
determined, through whatever cultural definition, to be attractive.”
