Brad Pitt: Gwyneth Paltrow's Dad Taught Me To Be 'Humble'

Brad Pitt has been popping up in headlines everywhere after a recent interview with Esquire magazine. He dished about decade-old drug use and inadvertently touched on his unfulfilled marriage to "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston. But now the "World War Z" star is getting attention for saying that the father of former flame Gwyneth Paltrow helped him to be "humble."

The couple broke up more than 15 years ago, but the words that her late father, Bruce Paltrow, told him still ring true today. Instead of calling himself an actor, Pitt prefers to use the term "self-employed" to describe what he does for a living.

"I learned that from Bruce Paltrow," he told the magazine. "I always liked it. It's a humble way to describe what we do." The 49-year-old actor added if a stranger asked him what he did, he would reply, "Well, I'd be very Midwest about it, very Missouri. I'd say, 'This and that.' I'd say, 'I'm a dad, just like you.'"

Paltrow and Pitt, who worked together on "Se7en," dated for nearly three years in the mid-'90s and were even engaged at one point, but they went their separate ways when the "Goop" founder called off their relationship before they could walk down the aisle.

"My kind of internal stuff really tripped up that whole relationship," Paltrow told Diane Sawyer in a Primetime Thursday interview back in 2003. "And I felt really responsible, and also like I was the architect of my own misery … I just made a big mess out of it."

Pitt went on the marry Aniston in 2000 and Paltrow married Coldplay frontman Chris Martin in 2003. Pitt later divorced the "Friends" star to eventually start a family with Angelina Jolie. The two have six children together. "I always thought that if I wanted to do a family, I wanted to do it big," Pitt said said. "I wanted there to be chaos in the house."