Brad Pitt may drive 180 mph race cars and brave punishing wilderness sets, but he has no illusions about chasing Hollywood’s premier daredevil. When it comes to matching Tom Cruise stunt for stunt, Pitt is bowing out.
Brad Pitt Laughs Off Comparisons to Tom Cruise’s Extreme Action
Discussing his grueling physical transformation for David Ayer’s rugged survival drama Heart of the Beast, Pitt was asked whether pushing his body to the limit, fresh off driving real high-speed sequences for F1 while Cruise readies Days of Thunder 2, spurred any friendly stunt rivalry between the longtime peers.
Pitt immediately laughed off the comparison.
“No. Hell no,” Pitt confessed. “I couldn’t keep up with Tom anyway. No, I’m… I leave the tough stuff to him.”
Despite downplaying his own daredevil credentials, Pitt endured what he described as the most exhausting shoot of his entire Hollywood career. Filmed in remote, rugged wilderness in rain or shine, Heart of the Beast required relentless physical endurance.
“I’m going to say it was a physically demanding adventure, probably the most I’ve ever taken on, and really physically and emotionally exhausting in that way, but worthy,” Pitt explained. “It was worth fighting for… This was really about, you know, it’s a survival story. But it ultimately was the love story underneath… it was worth any kind of discomfort we had to go through to tell this story.”
Ayer was quick to intervene when Pitt attempted to undersell his on-screen punishment, detailing how the production repeatedly tested the Oscar winner’s physical limits.
“Brad’s forgetting the part where we threw him in a bush plane, flew him around glaciers, tossed him into white water, had him slide down a mountainside again and again, dumped him off a ridge, and put him underwater for extensive work getting out of crashed planes,” Ayer noted.
Even with that punishing gauntlet under his belt, Pitt remains content leaving the sky-high aerial stunts and death-defying set pieces firmly in Cruise’s hands.
Heart of the Beast will release in US theters on September 25.
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