Sophia Michaels
Initially, Courtney Love was prepared to take to the grave her story about how Brad Pitt cost her a role in David Fincher’s Fight Club. But it came out anyway during an interview on the podcast WTF With Marc Maron, where she alleged that the role of Marla Singer was snatched from beneath her after she refused to grant Pitt the rights to play Kurt Cobain in a biopic four years after his death. Now, the Hole singer has doubled down on her claims in a statement with a key clarification: “I am not here 22 years later bitching about losing a part playing someone’s side piece in a movie.”
In the four-slide text post shared on Instagram, Love emphasized that, even though she still hasn’t watched Fight Club to this day after losing the role to Helena Bonham Carter, her actual gripes are rooted in Pitt’s dismissal of her initial choice to decline his request. “It’s a movie. Indeed, I passed on better roles than that. Who cares?” she wrote. “The point is Brad kept on stalking me about Kurt.”
On the podcast, Love recalled how she “went nuclear” on Pitt, who had locked in with director Gus Van Sant for a Cobain project that never materialized. “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit,” she claims she told him at the time. “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.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, a source close to the film claimed that although Love had auditioned, she was never offered the role, “You cannot be fired for a job you didn’t get.” In her post, Love insisted, “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.”
As Love explained in her post, the production of Fight Club was a catalyst for her long-harbored feelings about Pitt’s position in Hollywood. “Brad pushed me a bridge too far,” she wrote. “I don’t like the way he does business or wields his power. It’s a simple fact.”
She added that, despite the resentment in their past, she agreed to hear another pitch for the film from Pitt under the assumption that “we might both have changed our spiritual world views,” they could reach a solid middle ground. “Not to be,” she wrote.
“It’s not just the Zoom I had with Brad in 2020 where I said no to [Plan B Entertainment] and Brad producing it,” she explained. “It’s that I said NO on the Zoom and that was not enough, and I was not heard. I was ignored.”
Sharing the Fight Club story on Maron’s podcast was, for Love, a last ditch effort to get Pitt to hear her. “I felt Pitt would not stop pursuing Kurt – unless I said it in public,” she said. “I don’t want Brad to be pissed off at me and become his resentment. I want him to do better. I’m not into assault. Cmon brother Pitt. I wish you well, truly.”
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.”
