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Before Seven Years in Tibet, Pitt didn't know much about the country's predominant religion. He picked up a copy of Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, an introduction to the subject, but never cracked it, preferring in the end to enter the project as ignorant as was the character he plays, Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, when he stumbled across the Tibetan border in 1944. But on a movie set stocked with actual monks working as extras, the actor picked up a thing or two. "Their idea of a civilization that rejects violence on principle--I mean, what?" he ejaculates with Jackie Gleasonesque incredulity, feigning the shock of someone raised in a society, like ours, with a less diffident regard for force. "The Tibetans say, 'Don't look at this as our weakness but as our strength. If we bless our enemies, we become stronger.' They say, basically, 'Thank you for allowing me to become a stronger person by taking all the s___ you're giving me.' On the streets we'd look at someone like that as a wimp. Tibetans go beyond that. It's not fear. It's just, 'I'm sorry you feel that way [about me being a wimp]. I'm sorry you're spinning in that little mudhole.'" Seagal probably couldn't have said it better.
Pitt brushes off the controversy about Harrer's recently discovered SS past and the resulting news stories that suggested Pitt and director Jean-Jacques Annaud were making some kind of glam hero out of a Nazi scuzzbag. "That's a slant people took before they knew all the information," Pitt complains. "You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a f______ actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I'm a grown man who puts on makeup."
That stark reality didn't protect him from overeager Argentine admirers while shooting Seven Years in Tibet on location in the Andes, which doubled for the Himalayas. By one account, Pitt's living quarters were ringed by young girls chanting, "Ole! Ole, ole, ole! Brad Peeeeet!" "Yeah, yeah, there was that stuff," he says, embarrassed. "Argentina is a place where not many movies come through, so I could have been New Kids on the Block for all they cared. And that stuff never did much for my ego. I mean, when we were kids, my sister had Andy Gibb up on her wall, so that kind of puts it in perspective." Which, when you think about it--if you think about it--is a not un-Buddhist-like take on the burdens of Brad Pittitude.