Courtney Love is sticking by her story. After claiming on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that she was fired from 1999’s “Fight Club” because of a fight with Brad Pitt, a Variety report and an unnamed source within it refuted the claim. Their take? Love never actually had the role.
“You cannot be fired for a job you didn’t get,” the source told Variety. “It’s common knowledge that roles are not decided by other actors but by the director.”
But Love is firing back and doubling down. In an Instagram post, Love defended the story she told on WTF—she essentially got into a fight with Brad Pitt on the phone after he called her proposing a Kurt Cobain biopic film he would star in, and she went “nuclear” on him, which immediately tainted their relationship.
“Hi. Regarding a story, I told on the @marcmaron #wtf podcast. A story I was never going to tell. 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, 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.”
“It’s a movie. Indeed, I passed on better roles that [sic] that. Who cares?” Love wrote. “The point is Brad kept on stalking me about Kurt.”
Now the blackmail part of this is definitely a new claim and wrinkled to the story. Why would Pitt and Van Sant try and “blackmail” her? You can have a “Fight Club” role IF you give us rights to the Kurt Cobain story. Love’s story has always sounded legit so far, but that’s no way to conduct business or a creative partnership, and it doesn’t sound like something they would do, but who knows, I guess. But that’s a pretty severe accusation either way.
Initially, Love said she had the Marla Singer role in “Fight Club,” she had met with director David Fincher, and he was on board, and her fiancée at the time, Edward Norton, had the break the news to her that she had been “fired” from the film after her “nuclear” call with Pitt.
One suspects that Fincher and Norton could probably easily confirm or dispute this, and well, Fincher has a new film coming out later in 2023 (“The Killer”), and one assumes people will ask. Until then, and if you haven’t already, listen to the original podcast conversation here.