Brad Pitt in ‘Burn After Reading’ Is Still the Best-Ever Comedy Performance By An Extremely Hot Person
Brad Pitt may look like he’d only ever play a super suave leading-man role in a spy thriller, but appearances can be… deceptive.
Back in September, Wolfs, Pitt and George Clooney’s first joint comedy in 16 years, premiered with little fanfare and generally (but not enthusiastically) positive reviews. While the movie about two disparate fixers paired together for a sensitive job didn’t leave much of an imprint on the movie-going internet, it may have sparked a resurgence of interest in Pitt and Clooney’s paired filmography, especially in the comedy genre. Over the last couple of months, Twitter, TikTok and Reddit have seen a wave of posts discussing Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2008 black comedy Burn After Reading, with extra attention paid to Pitt’s performance as the bumbling, jock-brained, wannabe blackmailer Chad Feldheimer, a personal trainer who accidentally finds himself in possession of some sensitive… shit.
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As a new generation of cinephiles discover the brilliance of the Coen Brothers’ espionage satire, let's give flowers to the man who has already received too many of them. In all of film history, nobody else has ever been both as funny and as hot as Pitt in Burn After Reading.
In Burn after Reading, Brad’s Chad finds a CD containing the rough draft of the memoirs of a disgruntled ex-CIA agent, played by the hilarious-but-only-weirdly-hot John Malkovich, and Chad attempts to sell the sensitive information alongside his coworker, Frances McDormand. Chad’s oafish attempts at playing spy end in catastrophe for the CIA and — spoilers ahead — in the deaths of three people, including himself, in one of the most shockingly funny death scenes ever put to film.
At this point in the A-list actor and producer’s career, it’s a bit of a cliche to say that Pitt is a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body, but the old adage bears repeating when discussing the role that required him to have both the chiseled, leading-man body and the character actor comedy chops. Not only is Chad a personal trainer whose exceptional physical appearance is an obvious expectation for the role, but a big part of the reason why Burn After Reading works so well as an anti-spy comedy is that, based on his face, it looks like God made Pitt specifically to play the handsome star of a Mission: Impossible-type movie, or an American James Bond rip-off.
Take the car scene when “Mr. Black” attempts to blackmail Malkovich after rolling in on his definitely-not-Schwinn bike — decades of political and spy thrillers leading up to Burn After Reading have conditioned our brains to perceive the tall, handsome, athletic and impeccably styled man in the dark suit as mysterious and capable, and it looks inevitable that he will come out on top in a confrontation with a middle-aged, balding adversary like Malkovich. However, this scene hilariously goes in the exact opposite direction from the assumptions our brains subconsciously make based on its appearance.
After all, appearances can be, well, you know.
The brilliance of Pitt’s role in Burn After Reading is about more than just his natural comedic talent and abilities; it's about playing on the audience’s predisposition to associate impossibly good looking people with competence and sophistication, only for Chad to prove that he has neither as he spins his way straight into the center of a CIA shitstorm. When Chad dies with that winning, shit-eating grin splayed across his perfect face after making nothing but bad decisions throughout the entire movie, Pitt cemented himself as the funniest hot guy (or hottest funny guy) to ever grace the silver screen.
And that’s some impressive… shit.
