Brad Pitt is looking better than ever at 59 – here's how

In the pantheon of signifiers that suggest men and women may be edging towards equality, few are as contentious – from the male point of view, at least – as the fact that men’s appearance is now as regularly scrutinised as women’s – and never more so than when it comes to ageing. Nowadays, when a man looks preternaturally younger than his years, he solicits the same piquant mix of admiration, curiosity and envy as any well-preserved female. Case in point: Brad Pitt, whose youthful 59-year-old self made quite the impact at Silverstone over the weekend, thanks to an almighty glow-up that had many opining that the actor is a real-life Benjamin Button. 

That Pitt played Benjamin in the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages in reverse, explains why this comparison springs so readily to mind. But then, Pitt’s apparent ability to stop the passage of time does seem like a particularly curious case. Blink, and you’d swear he was still 35. 

Pitt is one of a coterie of men whose fresh-faced appearance has recently caused jaws to drop and hearts to beat faster among their ageing fanclubs. When Blur’s Damon Albarn briefly flashed a nipple at Wembley Stadium on Saturday night, there were few in the audience wishing the 55-year-old would put it away. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, performing in London’s Finsbury Park a week previously, looked similarly unchanged from his Britpop heyday. This year’s most unlikely male pin-up? One 57-year-old Rick Astley.

But back to Pitt, a man who is cruising into his sixtieth year with the grace and finesse of a racehorse. How does he do it? Can anyone? Or do you need the same amount of wealth, spare time and fortuitous genes as Hollywood’s most bankable male star? We examine his modus operandi, so you don’t have to.

The fashion

Pitt has always been a good dresser, in that consistent sort of way that suggests his stylishness is innate, as opposed to being out-sourced to a stylist. He has the wisdom to keep up with current trends without ever letting them overwhelm him: he always wears the trousers, as opposed to the trousers wearing him. He also picks his sartorial role models judiciously. As a fiftysomething man, you can’t go wrong with chanelling Robert Redford, as Pitt is often wont to do. 

The blue suede zip-up blouson he wore to Silverstone earlier this month was pure Redford, made modern by the addition of mirrored aviators and sweatpants in fashionable ecru. As a man who tends to gravitate towards soft, flattering hues such as denim, grey and slate blue, the green T-shirt and jacket he wore over the weekend was something of a departure. But it worked, providing a youthful pop of colour. 

The fitness regime 

Some 24 years after Fight Club was released, the legacy of Pitt’s body lives on, long after the film’s plot has been forgotten. According to a slew of personal trainers – and TikTok – said body remains the gold standard of male physicality, with the #fightclubworkout hashtag having received 5.2 million views. While Pitt won’t look quite so chiselled now, he still sports a lean and toned physique that would be the envy of someone half his age. 

Nick Finney, a London-based personal trainer whose previous clients include Robbie Williams and Fred Gibson (better known as Fred Again), is quick to acknowledge that good genes play a part. “He’s very lucky because he’s a natural ectomorph – slim, with low body fat. But he’s also putting a phenomenal amount of work in. There’s no magic bullet: it’s just progressive resistance training, which means keep lifting more weight than you did the week before. It’s boring, but it works.” As for whether it works if you’re a 59-year-old working in IT, Finney says: “there’s no evidence that suggests you have to slow down in your fifties. The main thing at Pitt’s age is staying injury-free. Provided you do, you can keep [going] with the resistance.”

The face

In the quest for good skin, Pitt has two weapons in his arsenal that other A-listers lack: his ex-partners Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston. What these two don’t know about skincare and age prevention isn’t worth knowing, so it stands to reason he’d solicit their advice. “Aniston keeps sending me stuff. She’s all over it. I trust her,” he said in a 2022 interview. “Paltrow is all over it, too. I’ll call her up, ‘I need a tip’, [then it’s] approved or not approved.” Whether “Aniston” and “Paltrow” approve of being referred to by the surnames, like Eton prefects, is unknown. What is known is that Pitt has turned his gurus’ wisdom into gold. Last year, the man who once claimed his attitude to skincare is “pretty lax” became the twillionth celebrity to launch a skincare brand, Le Domaine. With ingredients sourced in Pitt’s beloved Provence (where he also has a vineyard, Chateau Miraval), its hero product is a £155 anti-wrinkle serum containing 99.4 per cent naturally derived ingredients. 

Less naturally derived are his tweakments. “His eyelids look a lot more lifted, so he may have had a blepharoplasty, which is surgery to remove thickness of skin to make eyes look more open. Genetically, he’s prone to a low droop,” says The Aesthetics Doctor’s Dr Ahmed El Muntasar, GP and aesthetician. “He’s probably had bits of baby Botox in the past, but I don’t think he’s having as much now. He’s likely had some skin boosters, too, given the brightness of his skin.”

The hair

Pitt’s current hairstyle, a cornucopia of bronzed highlights glinting from a spiky, textured crown, is definitely not for the fainthearted: get it wrong, and you’d look like an ageing member of a dodgy Y2K boyband. According to the hairdresser George Northwood, it works because it’s Brad. “He gets away with it, because of his skin, bone structure, and the fact that he’s dressing well. It’s a package. It reminds me of his Gwyneth era heyday, when he had a similar style.”

 As for what to ask for in the hairdresser, Pitt’s colour technique is called a “shoe shine”, according to Northwood. “You dry the hair, set it, add hairspray so that it stands on end and then rub bleach onto it. Some bits will take [the bleach] more than others, which is how you achieve the effect.” But do not try this at home. “Not if you’re a man of that age. When you’re young you can experiment, but when you’re older it can look criminal.” Pitt’s cut, Northwood says, has been done with scissors rather than clippers, for a softer effect. “It’s a good style that would work just as well on silver hair,” he adds.

The diet

Pitt may be glowing now, but it wasn’t so long ago that his appearance was more a cause for concern than congratulation. In 2017, a few months after his divorce from Angelina Jolie, he opened up about his alcohol addiction, telling The New York Times that “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges”. Which can’t have been easy, given his wine estate in Provence. 

These days, he is said to stick to less extreme versions of the sort of healthy, muscle-building, high protein diets he so stringently adhered to when playing physical roles in films such as Fight Club, Troy and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: bland, clean dishes such as chicken, broccoli and brown rice. He’s also swapped out alcohol for matcha green tea, fizzy water and cranberry juice, telling a US magazine that “I’ve got the cleanest urinary tract in all of LA, I guarantee you”. Nick Finney points out that good nutrition is, in a sense, Pitt’s job. “I’ve worked with guys [like Pitt] and they have food delivered, a chef who cooks them breakfast and lunch. He has a phenomenal head start.”

Additional reporting by Abigail Buchanan