When the bombshell about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's sexual exploits surfaced two years ago, a hero in the story emerged. As actress Gwyneth Paltrow described it, her friend and A-list actor, Brad Pitt, stepped in to confront Weinstein face-to-face about his bullish treatment of women.
Paltrow and Pitt were dating at the time that Weinstein reportedly came on to her in a hotel room. She immediately relayed the incident to Pitt, who wasted no time in sending a warning Weinstein.
“It was so fantastic," Paltrow recalled. "He leveraged his fame and power to protect me at a time when I didn’t have fame or power yet. He said, ‘If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you,’ or something like that.”
CNN's Christiane Amanpour commended Pitt for his behavior in a satellite interview this week, but he didn't see anything spectacular about his actions. He was just doing what any "boy from the Ozarks" would have done.
"I think it's a bit much" to call him a hero, Pitt said. "At that moment I was a boy from the Ozarks on the playground. That's how we confronted with things and wanted to make sure nothing happened further."
With the "Me Too" movement having successfully ended Weinstein's Hollywood career and several other men who reportedly flaunted their authority to trap women, Pitt said the culture is changing.
Men's and women's dynamics, he explained, are being "recalibrated."
"And I do think it's an important story to tell," he added.
Pitt also got candid when Amanpour asked him to address his very public and very sad divorce from Angelina Jolie and how he eventually managed to cope with the painful separation. Now in his mid-50s, the actor said he's "done" trying to drown his sorrows.
"I don't want to be running from anything," he said, rather emotionally.
Pitt stars in the upcoming film Ad Astra, in which he plays an astronaut who's been assigned to go to space to try and find his missing father, played by Tommy Lee Jones.