Brad Pitt has spoken about identifying “safe” Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, after witnessing the effects of other Hollywood actors’ AA meetings being shared and exploited.

The 58-year-old got sober in 2016, embarking on a year and a half of the recovery program, after breaking up with his then-wife, Angelina Jolie.

Speaking to GQ, Pitt said: “I had a really cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe.

“Because I’d seen things of other people, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts, and that’s just atrocious to me.”

Hoffman, who won an Oscar for his leading role in Capote and garnered critical acclaim for turns in films such as The Master, Magnolia and Almost Famous, died of a drug overdose in 2014 after relapsing.

“I’m realising … that I value [my] missteps, because they led to some wisdom, which led to something else. You can’t have one without the other,” Pitt said in an interview back in 2019, adding that he drank “to escape”.

“I am quite famously a not-crier,” he continued. “I hadn’t cried in, like, 20 years, and now I find myself, at this latter stage, much more moved – moved by my kids, moved by friends, moved by the news.”

Elsewhere in the GQ interview, Pitt claimed he was currently in the “last leg” of his acting career.

“I consider myself on my last leg, this last semester or trimester,” he said. “What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?”