Parenthood has changed Brad Pitt irretrievably; in a candid interview with CNN’s Larry King, the 43-year-old father of four says celebrity is a door that swings both ways and that his family is “everything” to him and comes first before anything else.
“I duck and jive,” Brad Pitt told Larry King in an interview that aired Wednesday night referring to attention from the media. “Keep my head down.”
While the actor was never one to wallow in the spotlight, he says he can put his celebrity to good use. “The press uses me. I use it,” he said, referring to his current activist work for the rebuilding of hurricane-stricken New Orleans.
He minds most when paparazzi pursue his four children. “They call out my kids by name, shove cameras in their faces. My kids believe that any time you go outside the house, it's just a wall of photographers, people that take your picture. That is their view of the world. I worry about the effect it will have on them.”
He and partner Angelina Jolie, likewise a humanitarian, have four children, all under the age of 7. Three are adopted and both parents have said they want to enlarge the family. “We're just getting started,” Pitt said.
As he has stated before, being a father is what makes him most proud. “We put in long days [working]. And to go home and have dinner with your kids, and have to discipline one of them who's out of line, and still have the energy for that is ... I can't explain the fulfillment of that, but it is everything.”
One other thing bringing fulfillment for the actor is his current project Make It Right, which aims to rebuild New Orleans. Earlier this week he announced plans to build 150 eco-friendly houses in Louisiana's Lower 9th Ward, an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Pitt is vocal in his beliefs about the catastrophe that affected the region and left many living in trailers: “This was a man-made failure. This should not have happened.”
“It was a chain of events that culminated into this horrific event,” he said. “But it can be fixed.”
And now he is much more passionate about fixing than about acting. “It's become less and less a focus as I get older,” he told King. “I think it's really more of a younger man, younger woman's game.”
“At this point, I'd rather -- it takes so much time… there's just other things I'd rather be doing,” he added.
Despite his self-declared reluctance to pursue acting in the future, his job is still rewarding and perhaps still stimulating as Pitt was named best actor at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year for his role in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
The actor has said in previous interviews that he and his family enjoy living in New Orleans, where they bought a mansion in the French Quarter earlier this year. He has donated $5 million to the Make It Right project.