Brad Pitt Smoked Pot to Cope With Depression

Best Actor nominee Brad Pitt—who's always been candid about his past love of “Mary Jane”—tells Hollywood Reporter that over a decade ago he struggled with "dark" thoughts and used marijuana to help cope with depression. “I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s: I was hiding out from the celebrity thing; I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut; and I really got irritated with myself,” he recalls. “I got to: ‘What’s the point? I know better than this.’ ” The 48-year-old Moneyball star says he was figuring out who he was, and felt as though he was “majoring into depression.” After a trip to Casablanca, Morocco in the late '90s, Pitt decided he needed to make a change. “I saw poverty to an extreme I had never witnessed before...and the children were inflicted with a lot of deformities, and things that could have been avoided had become their sentence. It stuck with me.” He soon decided it was time to kick the pot: “I just quit. I stopped grass then—I mean, pretty much—and decided to get off the couch.” Pitt shared similar memories of his past with Parade magazine back in September: “I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic.” But the father of six now considers himself a “satisfied” man, and credits this to his love for Angelina Jolie and their children.