Brad Pitt on aging and adding more kids to the mix

By Stone Martindale Sep 5, 2007, 18:27 GMT

09/03/2007 - Brad Pitt - 33rd Annual Deauville American Film Festival - The Assassination Of Jesse James Movie Premiere - Deauville, France - Deauville, France © Pixplanete / PR Photos

Now on the flip side of forty, actor Brad Pitt credits his social activism and his parenting skills to growing older.

"I liked it, man," Pitt, 43, tells Details for its October issue about turning 40. "Maybe I had a crisis earlier or something. Maybe I had it in my 30s."

Of aging he adds, "One thing sucks, your face kind of goes. Your body's not quite working the same. But you earned it. You earned that, things falling apart."

Pitt is working with Global Green to build eco-friendly homes in New Orleans, among other projects.

Taking a hand in improving the world, he says, is "something that brought Angie and I together certainly – she's absolute evidence for me of someone facilitating changes for the better."

Getting older has opened the eyes of Pitt, citing part of his maturation process included learning to see the world beyond Hollywood.

"I carried the standard cynicism," he says. "But it was also feeling like, I can't sit on my couch anymore, I'm going crazy. This thing I'm doing with my life, it's very nice ... But it's not doing it for me."

Now, he says, adding more children to the mix are the plan for he and Angelina.

"We're not done," Pitt tells Details, echoing what he told reporters Sunday at the Venice Festival, when asked if he's prepared for a fifth child: "Yeah, we're ready."

Of the seemingly instant family he built with Angelina Jolie, "I had one kid, then two kids, then three kids [in] two and a half years or so," Pitt tells the magazine (on sale Wednesday).

But he hasn't been thrown by all the fast changes. "Listen, I've always embraced extremes, so it doesn't feel odd to me," he says. "There's a couple weeks of finding your balance, and then it's in stone."

Of the universe he has created with his family, Pitt says, "It pleases me so much. I get so warm. I don't even see in that, anymore, what their lives could have been. I have to intellectually think about that. They are a bond, they are a family. And I want to see those bonds and that family grow. And that right there, sitting in our kitchen, is how I want to see the world. It's how I want the world to be."

What does not appeal to him are the trainwreck D-List and worse celebrities: "This Paris Hilton quest for fame ... she's blissfully obvious." Remembering the heiress's stint in jail, Pitt says, "We hadn't seen television for ... like a month. I'm probably exaggerating. And we just got back to the United States. And we turned on CNN. And on comes Paris Hilton, going to jail. And so we just turned it off again."