“I Love You!”: Brad Pitt and Nick Cave Do Bromantic Art Therapy

The three have found each other in a kind of therapy group of the men of pain. Wanting to overcome addictions, divorces and losses together. Pitt’s divorce, Nick Cave’s dead sons, Houseago’s realization that he was abused as a child. Pitt brought the other two together six years ago and now they spend every spare minute together, they like each other very, very well and say ‘I love you’ more often.

“Our mutual misery became comical,” Pitt says, “and out of that misery came a flame of joy into my life.” Every once in a while guys like director Spike Jonze and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers join them.

“We’re just three guys doing something together,” says Houseago, who says he considers the time he spends together a “rebirth.” Cave says he went to the kitchen of the lake house where they received the Financial Times that morning: “I’m making coffee, in my underwear, and I see Brad sitting there. He starts playing the guitar and sings a of my songs for me – ‘Palaces of Montezuma’ – and then Thomas comes in his pajamas and sings along.” Bromance galore.

Pitt, in turn, raves about Nick Cave’s inimitable elegance and how he can just let go and be himself with his friends. Cave tells how he writes poems for Houseago when he is in a creative crisis and regularly receives small drawings from him.

It’s all very, very moving. And just like in a therapy group of mere mortals who talk their frustration out while the potter’s wheels turn or the plaster dries on a wooden skeleton. With a few minor differences in terms of millions and fame of course.