Long before he won two Oscars and became one of the most famous people in the world, Brad Pitt was just another broke actor in Los Angeles. He took whatever work he could find to pay the bills. He had a lot of odd jobs, but one of them really stands out. He drove strippers to bachelor parties, and as he put it, he tried to “get out of there alive.”
What It Was Like Driving Strippers for a Living
Pitt talked about this job on Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton. He said he found the gig through a place called the Job Factory. “It said, ‘Drive strippers.’ I said, ‘I got a car,’” the Hollywood veteran remembered. However, the job was about more than just driving.
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“My job was to go to the place and get the assignment, then go to the girl’s apartment, pick her up, and drive her to the party,” he explained. Once they got there, he had a bunch of other tasks. “You’d then be responsible for playing the music, which was cassette then. Then you had to catch the clothes so the guys wouldn’t steal them as they came off. And then you had to try to collect the money at the end and get out of there alive. It was not always easy.“
The Dark Side of the Job and Why Brad Pitt Stuck With It
The work was nothing like the glamorous life Pitt would have later. He told Newsweek that he sometimes did three or four shows in one night. He called it “a rude awakening for a boy from Missouri.” He said the atmosphere was “not wholesome” and admitted it “got very depressing.“
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Even with all that, Pitt told Lipton that he “did enjoy” the work. He also felt for the women he drove around. “They were small-town girls in a big city. I was a small-town boy in that same city. I knew how they felt,” he said.
How a Stripper Helped Launch Brad Pitt’s Acting Career
The job actually helped his acting career in a big way. He met a dancer through the work, and she told him about a famous acting coach named Roy London. “I didn’t know any actors—this was the closest I’d gotten to someone who actually worked,” he said. “She told me about this class she started taking. I said, ‘Give me the name.’ It turned out to be Roy London, who was a beautiful human being.”
Pitt says that connection is what started him on the road to fame. He talked about it again while promoting his movie ‘Babylon‘ and called that time his “mullet days.” “The first person I met who knew an actor [was] the young lady I was driving that night,” he remembered. It just goes to show that even the toughest jobs can lead to something life changing.
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