Brad Pitt and Edward Norton Were Drunk In an Unscripted ‘Fight Club’ Scene
Fight Club is a 1999 American film adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and directed by David Fincher. The film starred Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays the unnamed Narrator sick of his white-collar job. He attends support groups for people with terminal afflictions and finds it therapeutic.
The strange dynamic got ruined after the dissolute Marla Singer (Bonham Carter), who’s also a “faker,” starts showing up at his support group meetings; the Narrator is again unable to escape the limitations of his character flaws. Throughout the film, the narrator’s split personality, Tyler Durden, wears sunglasses used by insomniacs to filter out blue light, which is detrimental to melatonin production, a chemical essential for sleep.
The awkward friendship between Pitt and Edward
The depressed insomniac meets a strange soap salesman named Durden (Pitt). The two bored men form an underground fight club with strict rules and fight other men fed up with their lives. The fight club eventually turns into Project Mayhem, which quickly becomes dangerous and gets out of control.
Their perfect partnership falls apart when Marla, a fellow support group crasher, attracts Durden’s attention. Norton and Pitt took basic lessons in boxing, Taekwondo, and grappling and studied hours of UFC programming, which wasn’t right, to prepare for their roles. Before principal photography, Pitt also visited a dentist to have the cap on his chipped tooth removed.
A figment of his imagination
At first, The Narrator does not know that Durden is him; Durden is precisely what the Narrator wants to be, and a person who has an alter ego. He becomes involved with Marla, in which he is both jealous of and disgusted by himself. Splitting his personality is a defense mechanism, and Durden springs to life.
His apartment gets destroyed, and he finds himself living in a squalid house. The Narrator realizes that Durden is a figment of his imagination. He kills Durden but only hitting the Narrator’s cheek when he shoots himself in the head. It is clear that the Narrator is unable to forge real human connections and although it wasn’t mentioned, he most likely had dissociative identity disorder, which WebMD explains.
How Brad Pitt and Edward Norton ended up drunk on set
Some actors pretend to be drunk while acting but some admit that they were actually drunk while playing roles. For some actors, drinking in a role means drinking as a role, on set, even on camera. More than a few of the films we love involve actors who were either drunk previous to or as a fact of the scene itself. The actors can’t validate many incidents where they have shown up drunk, but some are confirmed to be true.
Pitt and Norton made this list among many other lists of celebrities who got drunk while filming their movies, as Food & Wine details.
They can’t say “the movie made me do it,” or it was just sipping for sex scenes because they needed liquid courage. No, Pitt and Norton were literally on break. During downtime on set, director Fincher saw Pitt and Norton hitting golf balls, which went straight into the side of the catering truck. This occurred after they had a few drinks together. Fincher turned the camera toward them, taking advantage of the moment. The scene ended up as one of the most iconic in the film.
The two actors, Pitt and Norton, got close while filming Fight Club, leading to a good “bromance.” There was constant laughter on the set, and they trusted each other so much that Brad allowed Norton to punch him. So yeah, we get why they would drink together. How much do you think you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?
