Brad Pitt Says He's Drinking Again After Seven Years Sober - "In a More Restrained Manner"

Brad Pitt at an “Ad Astra” screening in 2019. Photo by NASA/Aubrey Gemignani / Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For seven years, sobriety was a fixed part of Brad Pitt’s public story. In a new interview, he said that chapter has changed.

What He Said

Speaking to Esquire for its September 2026 cover, Pitt described the shift plainly. “I was sober for seven years,” he said. “And then I got back off the wagon.” He said he now drinks “in a more restrained manner.”

The actor framed it as controlled rather than a return to old patterns. According to the interview, he allows himself a few glasses of wine but approaches it carefully, saying he values his mornings and does not want to lose them to hangovers.

The Public Record He Is Revising

Pitt has said he stopped drinking in the period after his 2016 separation from Angelina Jolie, and his recovery had since become a recurring theme in his public interviews. The Esquire admission does not erase that narrative so much as complicate it: the same figure who spoke about quitting is now describing a measured return.

That is the collision at the center of the story. A years-long sobriety arc that fans had followed as settled is now, by his own account, no longer absolute.

What He Is Claiming, and What He Is Not

Pitt is not describing a relapse into crisis. By his own telling, this is deliberate and limited, defined by the mornings he says he refuses to give up.

Whether that distinction holds is his to prove over time, and he offered no further detail beyond the interview. What is on the record is his own statement: seven years sober, followed by a careful return he says he is managing on his own terms.

References: Brad Pitt Says He’s Drinking Again After 7 Years of Sobriety | Brad Pitt Reveals He’s No Longer Sober After 7-Year Stretch, Drinks in a ‘More Restrained Manner’ Now