Before Brad Pitt started shooting the F1 movie, he sat down with the entire grid at the British Grand Prix. The A-lister made the highly unusual move of joining the closed drivers’ briefing ahead of the race at Silverstone in 2023, where production was set to begin.
In an interview with GQ, Pitt revealed he told the drivers, “if we’re ever in the way, just tell us to f**k off.”
By this point, he and his co-star, Damson Idris, had spent time training at Le Castellet in the South of France, and at several tracks in the UK. However, the pair shocked the F1 world when they nonchalantly strolled out to the grid alongside the real drivers, and stood beside them during the national anthem.
Five days later, however, the SAG-AFTRA strike began, and filming halted.
“We got to Silverstone, which, my God, is a glorious track and became like a home for us and then we’re off and running, and we’re ready! We’re on the grid standing next to the actual racers,” Pitt recalled.
“The telecast is going to cut us out, but our cameras are going to get us all, we’re a part of it. We have this amazing weekend. Everything goes like clockwork. Everything’s sublime.
Brad Pitt on the grid for the filming of F1
Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images
“Everyone’s on a high adrenaline rush. We pull this thing off! I drove in front of 80,000 people in the stands on that day. I didn’t c**k up the car, didn’t put it in the wall, didn’t beach it, everything was good! And then the strike happens, and I was gutted.”
He went on, “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was bumping into walls. I was like, Oh man, man, we have this push and we had this — here we go! And then all of a sudden someone said: Cut.”
The strike, which lasted for 118 days, wasn’t all bad news for Pitt, however, who was quite pleased with getting “a whole nother year” behind the wheel of the modified Formula 2 cars used in the film.
When they returned to Silverstone the following year, he and Idris had a renewed sense of confidence.
“In 2023 I felt like I was in someone else’s court, someone else’s home and just was really humble and kind of shy about it,” Pitt explained.
“I had such reverence for these guys and this sport. But by the next year shooting there, it just felt like it was our own home and we were just so integrated into just the framework of the ecosystem that it was really nice.”
The F1 movie arrives in cinemas next month.
In this article
Emily Selleck
Formula 1
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