Courtney Love Says Brad Pitt ‘Pushed Me a Bridge Too Far’ After Kurt Cobain Film Pitches
Courtney Love is clarifying her comments a day after she joined Marc Maron for an interview on his WTF podcast, where the Hole frontwoman claimed that Fight Club star Brad Pitt got her fired from the role of Marla Singer after a tense conversation about a potential Kurt Cobain movie.
In an Instagram statement posted on Friday (Dec. 30), Love said that the situation was “a story I was never going to tell,” but Pitt had “pushed me a bridge too far.” She continued, “I don’t like the way he does business or wields his power. It’s a simple fact, and it started during the production of Fight Club.”
The singer then clarified that she’s “not here 22 years later b—-ing about losing a part playing someone’s side piece in a movie,” and doubled down that the story she told on the podcast was true. “The point is Brad kept on stalking me about Kurt,” she wrote.
“With all this resentment in our history, one might ask why I took yet another pitch for Kurt’s film from Brad after all these years? It’s because I’m in recovery. And resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other dies,” Love said. “I was over being mad about it. Plus, I heard Pitt was dealing with the same demons. So, we might both have changed our spiritual world views. Not to be.”
Love then said that after she rejected Plan B Films’ pitch about the late Nirvana frontman with Pitt as the producer, she “was not heard” and “ignored.”
“I told the story because I felt Pitt would not stop pursuing Kurt – unless I said it in public,” she continued. “If he’s mad at me, that’s his problem. I enjoy him as a movie star immensely. Not so much as a biopic producer.”
She concluded by noting that Helena Bonham Carter, who eventually secured the role Love claims she was fired from, “was utterly meant to be Marla Singer and I do not bear her or Edward Norton or David Fincher or Art Linson […] any ill will.”
On the WTF podcast posted earlier in the week, Love claimed that she “went nuclear” on Pitt after the actor and director Gus Van Sant pitched a movie about her late husband to her. “I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” she said. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the f— do you think are?”
She added that she told Pitt, “I don’t know if I trust you and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. They’re really good social justice movies, but… if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.”
Love, who married the Nirvana frontman in 1992 and was with him until his death at age 27 in 1994, revealed that after that conversation, she was fired from Fight Club.
A source close to the film shared in a statement to Billboard, “Nearly twenty-five years ago, Courtney Love auditioned for a role in Fight Club, a role she was never offered at any point. You cannot be fired for a job you didn’t get. It’s common knowledge that roles are not decided by other actors but by the director.”
Rania Aniftos
Billboard