Jordan Karlesson
Brad Pitt knows the trick to making a news headline. (It’s pretty easy, really.) Appear somewhere in public. Say the word “dating” for extra points. Say the word “dating” within earshot of an ex or rumored love interest for extra extra points.
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Case in point: At the 2020 Golden Globes Awards show, Jennifer Aniston laughed at a joke that Brad Pitt made about dating — and the story is still making the rounds.
Award shows can conjure up any reason to get Pitt onstage. But at the Globes ceremony in January 2020, there was a legitimate one: He won the Best Supporting Performance in a Motion Picture award. He got the trophy for his performance as Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The Golden Globe was among a slew of honors Pitt garnered for his role as an aging stuntman for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. But a joke he made about dating gave the ceremony a longer tail.
”I wanted to bring my mom, but I couldn’t, because anyone I stand next to, they say I’m dating. And that would just be awkward,” he said, per Diply.com.
Naturally, some of the cameras filming the Golden Globes captured the reaction of Pit’s ex-wife, Jennifer Aniston, to the joke.
And by that point, the tabloid chase was on to try to make more of the situation than there actually was. Some rags went so far as to delusionally declare that Brad Pitt’s joke implied that he and Jennifer Aniston were back together.
Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s Fast Times Together
It’s clear that Aniston and Pitt continue to maintain a friendship. For example, he attended her 50th birthday party in February 2019 — a year after she and then-husband Justin Theroux separated, Entertainment Tonight reported.
Also, in September 2020, with COVID raging, the ex-spouses lent their respective star power to a live reading of Fast Times at Ridgemont High on Zoom. Proceeds from the event — which also featured Sean Penn, Julia Roberts, Morgan Freeman, and others — went to charity. Specifically, to Penn’s nonprofit crisis response organization, Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE).
Aniston played read the part of Linda Barrett — the love interest of Brad Hamilton, read by Pitt.
That same month, Aniston told Howard Stern that she and Pitt indeed are friends, according to Access. “Brad and I are … buddies. We’re friends.”
Aniston insisted there was no awkwardness between the two during the Fast Times reading.
“It was absolutely fun,” she reportedly said.
