Ok, is there anyone out there who really does not like Brad Pitt?

I doubt it.

He really is a very likable guy when you hear him in interviews, he has a genuine smile and undeniable charisma. And hey, I am kinda diggin’ that mustache if ya know what I mean.

Like many, I would have to say my favorite Brad Pitt movie character is Tyler Durden of Fight Club. In fact, every time I watch it I am reminded of how damn sexy this man can be – as much as I don’t want him to be. The Sexiest Men of the Year as named by People magazine are generally not my type.

Heh.

Pitt does a great interview in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone and here’s an excerpt – but go and get the magazine on Friday to read it in it’s entirety.

Rolling Stone: Benjamin Button is your third film with Fincher. Going back to Fight Club, though, I found a quote where he talks about how you’re actually sort of similar to your character, Tyler Durden.

Pitt: In that I don’t bathe?

He didn’t mention that specifically. He said, “It’s probably a character closer to Brad in real life than most people would be comfortable knowing.”

[Pitt laughs]

“There is a childlike sense of anarchy….He is kind of a shit-stirrer and one of those people who is ‘Huh? Is that the current thinking? I don’t really buy that.’”

Well, that probably comes from growing up in a religious community. I just found it so stifling, my religion. I know it’s very comforting for other people.

Did you go to church every Sunday?

Yeah. And it was too much of what you shouldn’t be doing instead of what you could be doing. I get enraged when people start telling other people how to live their lives. It drives me mental. This Prop. 8 thing just drives me mental.

Where were you on election night?

Chicago. I went down to Grant Park, because I was doing Oprah the next day. I walked home from the park to the hotel, which was a half-hour walk. And I could walk freely — no one was interested in me at that point. People were weeping and hugging. The sense of elation in the streets — it was great. That was such a turnaround for us. We captured the original definition of America again.

Do you think Fight Club could have been made after September 11th?

No. Certainly not that ending. We debated it then. There’s a line we stuck in, about the buildings being evacuated.

Some critics just didn’t get that film.

Did you see the DVD that Fincher put out? He put all the negative reviews in the booklet. Some London critic said, “Not only is it anti-capitalistic, but it’s anti-society and anti-God.” We were like, “We didn’t realize it was that good!”

Benjamin Button and Fight Club actually deal with similar themes: having a finite amount of time in life, and what we should do with it.

But they come to such radically different conclusions. In Fight Club, the response to mortality is nihilism, anarchy —
[Laughs] That was a Nineties conclusion. Now we have an Aughts conclusion. I actually never thought of what you just said. But it’s probably true.

It’s just, Benjamin Button feels very positive, but you could easily come away from that story feeling very bleak.

Yeah, I think it’s open to . . . it’s your choice. I find Benjamin is about those universal things we all share — that 95 percent that makes us all the same, wherever we are in the world. Our loves, our hopes, but also the loss that we all walk around with and hide very well, and the ultimate notion that we’re all expendable. To me, it’s a counterstatement to this divisive period we’ve been in, where we focused on the two, three, four, five percent of ways in which we’re different.

[Read the full story in RS Issue 1068-69, on stands December 12, 2008.]