It's 18 years since Brad Pitt burst on to our screens in his scene-stealing cameo in Thelma & Louise. As the hustler with the blond locks and tanned six-pack who gave Geena Davis her first orgasm, he was the perfect Hollywood specimen. His crowning as People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive in 1995 and again five years later, seemed a mere formality.
Yet as he enters the hotel suite near to where he's filming Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, he appears a world away from his humble "himbo" beginnings.
Now 45, Pitt has aged remarkably well. He's been filming the role of Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers called The Basterds. His hair, swept to one side and shaved with military precision, is a dirtier blond than it once was. His face is angular, while his physique is slight, nowhere near the muscle-bound bulk he put on when he played Achilles in Troy.
Maybe it's that Pitt is now so frequently photographed with partner Angelina Jolie, he seems incomplete without her.
Ageing is the topic as Pitt is promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The film casts him as a man who is born old and ages in reverse, growing younger every day.
With Benjamin narrating his own "unusual circumstances", as he puts it, from his birth at the end of World War 1, Pitt has the difficult task of playing a man who's an observer in his own life. It's a far cry from, say, his suave Rusty Ryan in Ocean's Eleven and its sequels.
Fincher calls it "the stillest performance" in the actor's career. Pitt nods at the thought of this.
"Some parts are more gregarious, some are about internalising the moments. The process is more about watching the other actors and responding to what they give across the page."
His previous nod at the Oscars was in the supporting category for his asylum patient in Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995).
"The biggest battle is making a film you're proud of. That's the win for me. Awards are really nice. It's a fickle business. If your number comes up, it's fantastic, if not, we still walk away with a great film and really I think that's the healthiest way to play it."
While the film is primarily a romance between Benjamin and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), the ballerina he meets in his early years who grows up as he gets younger, it could just as easily be seen as a love-letter to Pitt himself.
Fincher toys with his movie-star iconography, notably in a scene when Pitt plays the middle-aged Benjamin without make-up. Riding a bike, looking like Steve McQueen in a leather jacket and shades, it's as if we're meant to acknowledge his place in Hollywood history.
"There's a real benefit to having somebody you can't walk 50m in the civilised world and not see a photograph of. People are so familiar with his face, you can work with that," smiles Fincher.
With the film a meditation on life, death, ageing and beauty, Pitt admits it was playing the wizened Benjamin that held his fascination.
"I've done the younger version, so it wasn't as interesting as what the future might hold. I can't say time will be as kind as I was to myself," says Pitt, who "got a little bit of say" in what his character looked like with wrinkles.
After Thelma & Louise put him on the map it didn't take long before he moved from bit-part player to leading man in films such as Legends of the Fall and Interview with the Vampire. By 1995, when he began dating Se7en co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, he was a tabloid favourite.
He'd been in relationships with Juliette Lewis, his co-star of 1993's Kalifornia. But in many ways a dry run for the Brangelina hysteria, Pitt and Paltrow, in the words of one critic, "were the only true heart-throbs of the mid-1990's".
The same, perhaps, wasn't true of his five-year marriage to Friends star Jennifer Aniston, which ended in 2005, just after Pitt had met Jolie on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith (2005). Aniston branded what her rival did as "very uncool" - though it's not difficult to see that Pitt has a problem with commitment.
More than once he has left projects at the 11th hour. In 2002, he bailed on Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, despite having grown a ZZ Top-like beard for his role. His reason? To spend more time with Aniston. He also pulled out of State of Play.
But it shows how cautiously he is approaching his career. Though careful enough to satisfy the studio bean-counters with sporadic blockbusters, he has mixed them up more esoteric projects.
Furthermore, as he steers away from trading on his looks he's emerging as a far more multi-faceted actor than old-school A-list stars such as Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis.
Indeed, between child-minding and charity projects with Jolie, it seems Pitt's main objective is to collaborate with cinematic legends.
He worked with the Terrence Malick on The Tree of Life. "I appreciate an auteur. It's a director's medium. They are the storytellers, guys obsessed with their craft."
Yet it's his role for Tarantino that will cause the most consternation. "The character is... absolutely outrageous!" Now that's tantalising. - The Independent
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