Brad Pitt Face Blindness: 'Some People Hate Me' for Seeming Disrespectful, Egotistic
Brad Pitt may have face blindness, a disorder where a person's ability to recognize faces is impaired, he tells Esquire magazine in a much-anticipated interview.
This is the first time Pitt has publicly shared about the possibility of suffering from face blindness, or prosopagnosia.
"So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them," Pitt tells Esquire for its June/July issue, to hit the newsstands on May 31. "I took one year where I just say, this year, I'm just going to cop to it and say to people, 'OK, where did we meet?' But it just got worse.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"People were more offended. … You get this thing, like, 'You're being egotistical. You're being conceited.' But it's a mystery to me, man. I can't grasp a face, and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested."
Pitt has not confirmed his suspicion that he has face blindness yet, but Carnegie Mellon Univerisity has offered to do brain imaging tests on Pitt for free after word got out that he might have the disorder.
The 49-year-old actor is engaged to Academy Award-winner Angelina Jolie, who also recently revealed her surprising medical condition – having a preventive double mastectomy.
"My doctor estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman," Jolie wrote in a New York Times op-ed article. "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy."
Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer when she was 56.
The Hollywood actress, who with Pitt parent six children, said it was her kids that ultimately made her decide to undergo the surgery. Her chances of developing breast cancer has dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent.
"I can tell my children that they don't need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer," she writes.
While Jolie has addressed her medical problem, Pitt has yet to solve the mystery of why he can't remember people's faces, even when he has a "real conversation" with them.
Pitt's new movie, "World War Z," an apocalyptic horror film, is due in theaters on June 21.
