Courtney Love has expanded upon recent comments that she made on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast about Brad Pitt getting her fired from Fight Club, explaining that she had “no plans” to bring it up, but Pitt “kept on stalking me” about making a film about her late husband Kurt Cobain.
During her conversation with Maron, Love claimed she was originally cast as Marla Singer opposite Pitt in David Fincher’s 1999 film (via Stereogum). However, she was apparently fired from the movie after arguing with Pitt, who allegedly wanted to play Love’s late husband Kurt Cobain in a Gus Van Sant biopic (which she clarified was not the filmmaker’s eventual 2005 drama Last Days). Helena Bonham Carter ended up playing the role instead.
“Brad pushed me a bridge too far. I don’t like the way he does business or wields his power,” Love wrote in an Instagram post. “It’s a simple fact, and it started during the production of Fight Club. I understand how much of a game of roulette casting is. I am not here 22 years later bitching about losing a part playing someone’s side piece in a movie.”
She continued, “On the podcast, I recount the day Brad & Gus Van Sant called me from lunch and tried to blackmail me over my role, for [the] rights to a film about Kurt. I lost my shit on them, and by 7pm I was fired from Fight Club. Every word of this is factual. This was always a secret that I was fine keeping… The point is Brad kept on stalking me about Kurt.”
Later on in the post, Love wrote she had no “ill will” toward Carter (who was “utterly meant” to play Singer), Fincher, Fight Club star Edward Norton, or producer Art Linson. You can read her full note in the Instagram post below, followed by the full podcast itself.
Love also said on the WTF podcast that she had rejected another pitch from Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment about a Cobain biopic as recently as 2020. She elaborated on Instagram about why she agreed to speak to him again in the first place.
“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,” Love explained. “And resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. I was over being mad about it. Plus, I heard Pitt was dealing with the same demons. So, we might have both changed our spiritual world views. Not to be.”
Love added that she felt like her “no” on the Zoom call “was not heard” and “ignored.” So when the opportunity came to tell the story in public, she took advantage with the hope that it might convince Pitt to “do better.” She went on to say she enjoys him “as a movie star,” but “not so much” as a biopic producer.
Pitt most recently starred in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon after telling GQ this summer that he considered himself on the “last leg” of his career. In 2022 at least, he remained busy with additional roles in The Lost City and Bullet Train as well as Plan B productions like She Said and Blonde. Barring a major change of heart, however, it looks like his dream of a Kurt Cobain biopic won’t be one of his final projects.
Elsewhere in Love’s conversation with Maron — which she promised will be her last podcast appearance “for another few years” — she called Lana Del Rey and Kurt Cobain “the only two true musical geniuses I’ve ever known.”