When Brad Pitt was 27, he dated 17-year-old Juliette Lewis. He said their relationship was 'the greatest'.

You can’t blame Juliette Lewis for being sick of being asked about Brad Pitt. The actress, who had a massive 2022 thanks to Yellowjackets and Welcome To Chippendales, split with Pitt back in 1993 and spent the next couple of decades facing questions about him.

In 2014, she told People that press coverage about her was "usually about Brad Pitt or drug addiction". 

"I was 22. I'm 40. I quit all my bullsh*t at 22. There is growth. Get out of the past," she said.

But there’s a reason the media have been obsessed with the relationship. When the two actors started dating, Lewis was in her late teens and Pitt in his late twenties. Both of their careers were about to take off in a big way. They were together for four years, and after they split up, Pitt told Vanity Fair, "It was one of the greatest relationships I've ever been in."

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Lewis had achieved a lot before she met Pitt. The daughter of character actor Geoffrey Lewis, who starred in movies like Every Which Way But Loose, she hung out on film sets as a child. Her parents split when she was very young, and she spent time living with both of them, but when she was 14, she became legally emancipated from them so she could work longer hours. 

She quit school at 15 and took on roles in TV shows like The Wonder Years and movies including National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, where she played Audrey Griswold.

"As a teenager I was severely, cripplingly dramatic and in search of self," she told The Guardian.

The young Lewis sought out drama, telling The Guardian in another interview that she would deliberately put herself in situations that were "not healthy". 

"I would hang out with tough people," she explains. "Real hoodlums, gang members, just to see how dangerous it could get."

At 16, Lewis shot the tele movie Too Young To Die?, starring as a sexually abused teenager who commits murder after coming under the influence of a prostitute, played by Brad Pitt. They fell for each other.

Juliette Lewis and Brad Pitt in Too Young to Die? Image: IMDb.

"We met on a movie and started dating when it was over," Lewis told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. "I already liked him as an actor, plus you gotta respect somebody who’s in the same field as you."

Pitt, nearly 10 years older than Lewis, had already been romantically linked to a number of other young actresses, including Jill Schoelen, his co-star from the horror movie Cutting Class, and the teenage Christina Applegate from Married... With Children. But his relationship with Lewis got seriously pretty quickly. The two of them moved in together.

"It was such a lovely time in my life — well, in both of our lives — because we were anonymous," Lewis told Blackbook. 

"For half of our relationship, we were just unknown young actors in LA. I even remember his little bungalow that we lived in off Melrose that we'd smoke lots of pot in."

Pitt had an affectionate take on the relationship when he spoke to Rolling Stone in 1994.

"We were trying to be Sid and Nancy or something. We were idiots. We were just having a great time."

As their careers took off – Lewis getting nominated for an Oscar for Cape Fear, Pitt achieving sex symbol status in Thelma & Louise – they became one of the hot couples of the early 1990s, photographed on red carpets together. They were thrilled to be cast opposite each other in the 1993 serial killer road trip movie Kalifornia.

"We’re at the point in love where we just like to see each other every single day and we don’t get bored with each other, so it’s really, really nice," Lewis told the Los Angeles Times during an interview on the set of the movie.

"You do a scene and then go over and grab the one you love," Pitt added. "You want to keep your careers your careers and your love your love, but we just wanted to do it more for a vacation."

Sadly, their relationship didn’t last long beyond the making of Kalifornia. They split in 1993, with Lewis’s publicist saying they planned on "remaining friends".

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Lewis was next linked to Johnny Depp, her co-star in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. She struggled with drug addiction and went through a rehab program run by the Church of Scientology. 

"I had too much energy, so I was actually trying to sedate it," she told The Guardian. 

Meanwhile, Pitt moved on with Czech model Jitka Pohlodek, even though he wasn’t really over Lewis. 

"I still love the woman," he told Vanity Fair. "The problem is, we grow up with this vision that love conquers all, and that's just not so, is it?"

Despite their plan to remain friends, Lewis and Pitt drifted apart. Lewis married and then divorced professional skateboarder Steve Berra. She temporarily quit acting for a musical career with her band Juliette and the Licks. 

In 2006, Lewis told The Guardian that her relationship with Pitt "seems like a high-school relationship".

"I hope he finds happiness because I genuinely loved him," she said. "He's a very stand-up, good guy. Four years was an eternity at that time. It was my longest relationship, and we both lost our anonymity together."

"We're strangers now. Isn't that weird? I don't know him as an adult, and he doesn't know me."

Feature Image: Getty.

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