Actor Brad Pitt believes he is struggling with a medical condition that causes face blindness.
The actor shared with GQ that he believes to be struggling with Prosopagnosia which is a neurological disorder where “you cannot recognize people’s faces,” according to NHS.
It can also affect a person’s capacity to recognize certain things like cars or places and the person may not even be able to recognize their own face in the mirror.
Pitt shared that he has not been officially diagnosed with this disorder, but he would like to remember the people he meets and feels shame that he can’t.
He fears that it has caused others to have a misconception of him because it causes him to come across as self-absorbed and aloof.
“So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them,” he told Esquire in 2013. “So I swear to God, I took one year where I just said, This year, I’m just going to cop to it and say to people, ‘Okay, where did we meet?’ But it just got worse.”
Continuing, he said, “People were more offended. Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I’ll say, ‘Thank you for helping me.’ But I piss more people off. You get this thing, like, ‘You’re being egotistical. You’re being conceited.’ But it’s a mystery to me, man. I can’t grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested.”
Pitt told GQ that nobody believes that he really has this disorder. It has caused him to become a homebody, according to Esquire.
“Nobody believes me! I wanna meet another,” he told GQ.
Dr. Leah Croll, an assistant professor of neurology at the Temple University Hospital, told “Good Morning America” that “this is a very real syndrome.”
“I think that Brad Pitt is experiencing something that many patients experience which is this funny feeling that something is off, but they’re not quite sure what it is or where to go for help,” she said.
Croll added, “So someone thinking that Brad Pitt story sounds familiar to them or that they’re having similar symptoms, I would recommend they go see a neurologist and get formally tested and evaluated.”