Dumb, Hot, and Confident – Brad Pitt Is at His Best When He’s Playing Himbos

The Big Picture

• Brad Pitt’s role in
  Thelma & Louise
  solidified him as the ultimate himbo icon with his sensual charm and effortless trustworthiness.
• Pitt’s performance as Floyd in
  True Romance
  showcases his ability to turn the pothead cliché into a sidesplitting scene-stealer with his unquestioning niceness.
• In
  Inglourious Basterds
  , Pitt’s portrayal of Lt. Aldo Raine radiates pure himbo energy with his overconfidence and rock-hard conviction in his mission.

In case you haven’t heard, we’re living in the golden renaissance of himbos. The himbo king of the 90s, Brendan Fraser, capped a monumental comeback with an Academy Award win while Ryan Gosling channeled unparalleled amounts of himbo energy to become just Ken in Barbie. It’s truly a glorious time when we can put proper respect on such benevolent golden retrievers in human form, but one particular icon gets consistently left out of the conversation. If we’re going to invite the likes of Fraser and Gosling to the himbo party, there’s only one person who can be the proper host: Brad Pitt.

‘Thelma & Louise’ Made Brad Pitt An Instant Himbo Icon

If anyone out there needs an example of what a himbo truly is, look no further than the role that Pitt stole from George Clooney to become an overnight star in Thelma & Louise. J.D. (Pitt) is a hitchhiker who crosses paths with Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) and joins them on their adventure. He takes a particular liking to Thelma, and the two have a connection that gradually builds into a sensual one-night stand. Much has been made of Pitt’s natural looks, but that only has the effect it does because of his supersonic charisma and the way Thelma looks at him in every scene, selling him as the ultimate boy-toy fantasy. It’s not enough that he’s shirtless for 40% of his screen time and has the softest Southern accent. J.D. is a dream come true because his manners and simplicity make him feel so effortlessly trustworthy, which pays off nicely when he upends that expectation by robbing Thelma and Louise of their money. He uses his perceived stupidity as a smokescreen for his duplicitous behavior, and it shows how quickly Pitt has a keen understanding of how to not only be a great himbo but to use that perception against the audience.

‘True Romance’ Gives Us One of Pitt’s Funniest Characters

True Romance, directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino, gave us a gaggle of wild characters tumbling and crashing into each other in a world of crime, mobsters, and Hollywood. Of that cast, the most randomly included is Floyd (Pitt), a roommate of a character named Dick (Michael Rapaport), who spends all day smoking various drugs and rarely leaving his couch. Floyd is at once useless and vitally important to the plot, as he’s indirectly responsible for bringing characters from different subplots together, thanks to his naïvely rapid rapport with anyone who will show up to talk to him.

Pitt’s performance turns the pothead cliché into a sidesplitting scene stealer, giving Floyd a sense of pride in his couch potato life. It’s difficult to figure out how dumb Floyd truly is, given he’s high out of his mind in every scene; but some people are so unquestioningly nice that it makes them dumb, and Floyd would easily fit into that category. No other kind of person would have a conversation with James Gandolfini at his most devilish and think “Yeah, I should tell this guy where my friends went, and then invite him to watch TV with me.” It should make Floyd almost repellent, and yet Pitt makes him such a fun hang and a nice reprieve from the insanity of the rest of the story.

‘Inglourious Basterds’ Gave Us Army-Flavored Himbo

Tarantino must have had Pitt in the back of his mind for a while, as it would be 16 years before they would properly collaborate again when they teamed up for the director’s WWII masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds. Brad Pitt’s performance as Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of a group of soldiers who only want to kill Hitler and any Nazis they come across during World War II, is a revelation of over-the-top goofiness that Nicolas Cage would approve of. One of the underappreciated aspects of himbos is their drastic overconfidence, hoping that their charm will be enough to get them through any situation, and Aldo Raine thrives on his rock-hard conviction in his single-minded mission in life.

With a Tennessee accent so bad that it boomerangs back around into being amazing and Tarantino’s genius understanding of movie star magic, the film sells you on the idea that a squawking cartoon out of an old propaganda film could convincingly defeat an evil genius like Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Look at how proud Aldo is of himself for seemingly fooling Hans with his pathetic Italian accent (“GorlAaAami”), and you tell me he isn’t radiating pure himbo energy. It’s a role that only succeeds because of Pitt’s sharp ability to make anything he does plausible via sheer movie star power.

‘Burn After Reading’ Is Screwball Comedy Genius

Despite Pitt’s renowned history of playing dumb guys who think they’re smart, nothing could have prepared us for Chad Feldheimer. Burn After Reading, one of the most unfairly maligned films of the Coen Brothers‘ career, has to be the most overtly wacky story they’ve concocted, answering the question “What if Preston Sturges wrote an Alan Pakula thriller?” This twisted debacle of what happens when a CIA operative’s memoirs get leaked out into the open world is the MacGuffin that allows esteemed actors like George Clooney, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich to make absolute fools of themselves in glorious fashion. Though none of them can truly compare to what Pitt is doing, taking the art of being the biggest dumbass in the room and turning it into an absurdist clown show, and for that, I thank him, as it gave us arguably the funniest performance of his whole career.

If you looked up “himbo” in the dictionary, it would have Burn After Reading‘s Chad Feldheimer’s picture next to it. Every single thing about him was created in a lab to be a himbo, from his stupidly enormous pompadour to his fixation on health and fitness that verges on the level of parody. Even when he’s scheming about how to blackmail a CIA man for money, he can’t stop thinking about what kind of water he’s drinking and how far he’s pedaled on his Schwinn bike. Given that he has the brain of a gerbil falling off of its wheel, the glee with which he rubs his one-and-a-half brain cells together to hatch a harebrained scheme is a kind of happiness that I could never dream of, and it’s downright infectious.

Try and watch Chad do one of his little self-satisfied dances without being convinced that this is shameless clownery on a level that we rarely see, and it’s such a blessing. Pitt has shown a far greater willingness to “deglamorize” or make himself look silly compared to other major male stars (see: his Deadpool 2 cameo or his nonsensical voice in Snatch), but it’s another thing entirely to watch him pull off some of the most oafish faces we’ve seen a traditional matinée idol have the gumption to show in public. The last time we saw an actor commit this hard to buffoonery, Kevin Kline won an Oscar for it. It makes it immensely fitting that when Pitt finally won his Oscar, it was for a role that perfectly refined his himbo qualities.

‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood’ Forever Confirmed Brad Pitt’s Himbo Status

Remember what I said about Tarantino understanding movie star magic? He put that skill to brilliant use in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, casting Pitt in a role tailor-made for his career of living off of the vibes of being hot and simple. Cliff Booth (Pitt) is a Hollywood stuntman turned pariah who probably killed his wife, definitely got his ass beat by Bruce Lee (then turned the tables on him), and just wants to hang out with his two best friends: his pet dog, Brandy, and Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the actor he’s spent his career doing stunts for. Pitt swept nearly every award show, most notably the Oscars, for his performance in this film, and it served as both a testament to one of the last classic movie stars we have and a perfect opportunity to properly appreciate him for all of his work as a patron saint of himbos.

The idea of Brad Pitt getting accolades for unnecessarily taking his shirt off, having us watch him lovingly feed his dog, and spending an entire film reminding DiCaprio that he’s one of the baddest dudes on the planet is absolutely wild — but it’s also such a pure distillation of all the best attributes of being a himbo that it’s a mad science experiment gone tremendously right. Cliff is by no means a “good guy,” (he most likely killed his own wife) but he makes for one of the best hangs in recent memory; how else can you explain audiences lapping up entire scenes of just Brad Pitt driving through 1970s Hollywood? That’s the kind of nonsense you can pull off when you’ve been blessed with great himbo power and Brad Pitt has continued to use that power responsibly for the duration of his magnetic career.

Thelma & Louise is available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.

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