No joke: The Tree of Life star Brad Pitt once played the role of “Hot Cowboy” on Dallas.
How did this happen? It was not long after Pitt drove from Missouri to Los Angeles in his beat-up Datsun with $325 in his pocket when he showed up for a cattle-call audition for The Hogan Family. By force of sheer hotness, in 1987 he landed a recurring role on Dallas.
Brad’s discovery:
In an exclusive interview, Snakkle spoke to then-Hollywood casting assistant Bianda Cioffi-Zaring, who remembers the moment she spotted Pitt: “Standing in the back left corner of the room was Adonis, and I was just startled, like, Oh my God!”
Cioffi-Zaring then ran and told her boss she had found someone who could play the role of Randy on Dallas, the “sexy young cowboy.” She immediately cast him, even though he was so green he didn’t yet have a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) card. Dallas not only launched Pitt’s career, it also provided him with a new girlfriend, costar Chalaine McCall, who has since left Hollywood to become a librarian.
All that and a bag of nice:
Cioffi-Zaring reports that Pitt was a young man with manners: “One day I came back from lunch and there was a big canister on my desk of cookies with a note thanking me for helping him get his SAG card.”
See Pitt in Moneyball starting September 23, 2011.
September 12, 2011 at 10:38 pm, Sally K Witt said:
Great to see him so young. I never watched Dallas before, so this was fun!
September 22, 2011 at 11:14 pm, Aaron said:
I remember him on the daytime soap Another World in 1987.