Hollywood star Brad Pitt has broken his silence on one of the most tumultuous chapters of his life — his divorce from actress Angelina Jolie and the subsequent alcohol dependence.

“I was pretty much on my back, on my knees,” Pitt said. “I was really open to trying anything that anyone threw at me. It was a particularly difficult time,” he said in a recent appearance on the podcast Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, opening up about attending his first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.

Although he entered the room filled with nervous energy, Pitt said the openness of others at AA helped him lower his guard. “Everyone was so open, it gave me permission in a way to go, ‘OK, I’m going to step out on this edge and see what happens.’ Then I just really grew to love it.”

The experience, Pitt added, stood in stark contrast to his upbringing in Missouri’s Ozarks, where emotional repression was commonplace. “Everything’s great” was the default response to even the deepest wounds, he said.

Pitt’s struggles with alcohol came under intense public scrutiny after an alleged altercation on a private jet in 2016, which reportedly led to the collapse of his marriage.

Legal filings at the time accused him of assaulting Jolie and two of their children during the flight. While both the FBI and the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services launched investigations, they eventually decided against filing charges.