Two years ago, back in 2017,布拉德·皮特covered GQ经过几个月的世界大战戏剧，他从安吉丽娜·朱莉（Angelina Jolie）分手后，这是一个宣传的转变。当时他正在晋升War Machine他谈到了戒酒,他的“自我flicted” troubles, the “façade” that has at once protected him but also detached him from…what? It’s an analogy he’s used often and he describes it again in a new interview withGQ as the magazine’s October 2019 cover star, to promoteAd Astra.He’s a gazelle detached from the herd:

多年来，当人们问他成名时，皮特一直有一个类比。（人们一直这样做。）他将其描述为“是那个孤独的凝视。老虎，你知道，他们在那里。他们在草地上。而且您已经失去了牛群。您不再与牛群建立联系。就是这样。这就是失去隐私。并被狩猎。”

我一直喜欢这个类比。它的诚实，即它的方式 - 在孤独和恐惧的钝性结合以及永久观察的感觉中 - 抓住了必须与真理接近的事物，而不会特别自在或愤怒。他失去了牛群。就是这样。

I asked if he felt any kinship with the astronaut he played in Ad Astra: another guy split off from humankind, gone places that can only be rendered to the rest of us by way of fables and metaphors.

“Well, that makes it sound much more noble than it is,” Pitt said.

But it shares that quality of, no one really understands, and you can't reliably bridge the gap.

“Until you see that other gazelle.” DiCaprio, maybe. He doesn't say exactly.

But how many gazelles are there in this world, really? Like, five?

“Yeah. No, it's odd.”

There was a time when we believed and he believed, and she too, that the “other gazelle” was Angelina. Now Brad, the gazelle, is alone again on the plain. She, however, well, she might say that she has her herd: their children. But we’re not supposed to think that about that too much. Any reference in this piece to family and their kids is brief, mentioned as an unchallengeable fact in a list of his quotidian activities:

He sculpts now. Listens to a lot of music. Does dad stuff. And he seems to watch a lot of movies, according to people who know him.

This is not a profile of Brad Pitt, the father, but of Brad Pitt, the actor. And man. A modern man in the body of a traditional man, wearing the face of the ultimate man. He looks amazing.

And those aren’t even the best shots in the article. There are so many shots in this article. So many shots of Brad Pitt wearing the sh-t out his wardrobe, timelessly smoldering – in a suit or a sweatshirt, and we see him in both in GQ; at 55 he can wear a dress shirt and trousers with easy maturity and jeans and a tank top with the same youthful authenticity. Even in fashion, Brad Pitt endures. He’s a classic but not a conformist, that rare combination that adds up to icon: revered by the past, embraced by the future.

This is, pretty much, the thesis of the profile. And to some extent, I agree with it in that there aren’t very many Brad Pitts around or made anymore. In the celebrity ecosystem, he is, indeed the “odd”, as he says, gazelle. So I get why this reads as a blowjob. It’s hard enough to get face-time with a star of Brad’s status. And here he is assessing with you and interrogating his stardom through the lens of an evolving masculinity, specifically white masculinity, for a magazine aimed at the masculine. Of course it’s tempting to declare him the masculine hero.

And it’s scary to look too hard at our heroes. “Never meet your heroes”, as the saying goes. So you’re not asked to in this piece. He doesn’t let you – Brad Pitt is an expert at talking around himself – and I’m not sure anyone really wants to. Many times reading this I wondered to myself what the difference would have been if Brad was profiled by a woman, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner or Caity Weaver or Allison P Davis, if we would have gone to any other places, even while Brad was avoiding them, what the perspective would have been, especially during a conversation about what is passed onto children, how Brad is challenging within himself his relationship to power and vulnerability, but then I realised that maybe we can’t ask those questions until we’re ready to know what the answers are, until we’re able to see past Brad Pitt as he appears on this cover, behind sunglasses and under a hood, and in these pages, golden and perfectly aged, on the surface the human manifestation of the finest whiskey. How fine? This fine:

我们如何愿意认为它可能不会那么好？仅考虑他是最佳男配角奥斯卡（Oscar）的领先者，他是电影的学生，他在这件作品中将自己定位为电影的后卫之一，在幕后和镜头前。他不仅是公共英雄。他是好莱坞的英雄。他们如何投票给其他人？我们怎么能？

Click here要阅读Brad Pitt在2019年10月号中的完整GQ个人资料。