Brad Pitt's 'nether regions' felt the squeeze of his 'awkward' spacesuit in 'Ad Astra'
WASHINGTON – Brad Pitt's two latest roles are a study in contrasting wardrobes.
As 1960s stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon A Time in Hollywood," threads of the day meant jeans and a T-shirt – and no T-shirt for those days when Cliff's fixing a TV antenna. The futuristic space adventure "Ad Astra" (in theaters Friday), which stars Pitt as Roy McBride, an astronaut who goes planet-hopping to find his missing father, meant a much more restrictive outfit.
Did strapping into a spacesuit make him feel like a real sci-fi guy?
"No," Pitt admits to USA TODAY, wearing a grin. "I'm wearing a garbage bag under a snowsuit with this binding harness that's grinding my nether regions and being suspended by cables. That's really what it feels like."
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Co-star Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Roy's dad, was impressed by Pitt's coolness and patience with being hoisted up and hung upside down in his harness for the zero-gravity scenes: "He was a very good soldier about putting up with that awkward costume."
Writer/director James Gray was surprised at how difficult – and worrisome – it was putting Pitt through the galactic motions. "Actors have enough to deal with, let alone a kind of punishing physical series of acrobatic moves that they have to do at the same time they're trying to emote."
But Pitt was always a trouper, he adds. "He never complained. It was me feeling like I didn't want to put him through the wringer yet again."
Looking back, filming all the space shenanigans – which in the movie include a fall off a space antenna, a moon-buggy chase with lunar pirates and a cosmic shootout – offered Pitt some perspective.
"Whatever it takes to get the shot we need, I pretty much operate under that," he says. Also, "life is discomfort, so what are you going to do about it but roll with it?"
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Brad Pitt's 'nether regions' felt pinch of his 'Ad Astra' spacesuit
