There was a moment last month, after the premiere of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford at the Toronto International Film Festival, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie looked like they were going to be swallowed by the crowd. Literally.
Their getaway limo was ringed by squawking, bawling fans, faces pressed to the car window, flashbulbs flaring, cell-phone cameras going crazy, the streets jammed, traffic at a standstill. It was like something out of, well, a movie.
It's not what the Springfield, Mo., kid bargained for when he did a couple of musicals on the Kickapoo High School auditorium stage and thought maybe he'd try out some of this acting stuff.
A lesser soul might say, Enough of this, I don't want to be Brad Pitt - that Brad Pitt - anymore.
"If I did, then I should get out," says Pitt, 43 now, the grinnin' movie star, the Us magazine cover boy, People's Sexiest Man Alive (twice), the adoptive and natural dad of Maddox, Zahara and the rest of that paparazzi-plagued Jolie brood.
"But if at some point you ever find yourself saying, 'Whatever happened to that guy?' well, you know," he says, pausing for a couple of contemplative beats, on the phone from New York the other day.
"But it certainly doesn't come with a handbook - all of this. You don't realize that that's the deal you're making, but at the same point, it speaks to [the fact] that the films are working. So it's a double-edged sword."
The latest film, the aforementioned, Andrew Dominik-directed Jesse James, opens tomorrow at the United Artists RiverView Plaza, the Bridge Cinema de Lux, and the Showcase at the Ritz Center in Voorhees. A lopin', poetic oater about the last days of the legendary outlaw, the movie - with a creepily compelling Casey Affleck in the role of Robert Ford, a groupie-turned-compadre who winds up killing his one-time hero - speaks to the nature of fandom and celebrity. Jesse James, in his day, was a pulp-magazine and dime-store-novel star. His name sold newspapers.
"Yeah, I was surprised to see how much tabloid journalism was alive and kicking at that time," Pitt says. "It just tells me that not much has really changed, there's just more of it - there's just more of everything today."
