Toto Wolff has revealed how Lewis Hamilton told Brad Pitt that he was “much too old” to be a Formula One driver fighting for World Championships. The conversation, which left the Hollywood icon “not impressed”, eventually triggered a change to the script for the project.
Initially, Pitt’s character – a veteran racer named Sonny Hayes – was set to fight for an F1 title against the sport’s greats, but in the finished product, he makes a return to Grand Prix racing in his fifties, competing for the struggling fictional team, APX GP, working alongside a hotshot rookie, Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.
This change was triggered following a dinner with Wolff, Hamilton and others during the early stages of production. Recounting the conversation at the Autosport Business Exchange New York, Wolff said: “So at the beginning, you know… I am lucky.
“I’m seeing lots of people who have a big media profile, but there was one dinner that we organised with Joe, who is the director, and Jerry Bruckheimer, Lewis, Brad Pitt, Susie [Wolff] and I.
“We had dinner at our place in Oxford, and suddenly the door opens and there’s Brad Pitt in the driveway and he says, ‘Thank you for having me for dinner.’ So that was a bit of a surreal experience.”
Wolff went on: “The initial concept was him (Pitt’s character, Hayes) being a driver and fighting for a World Championship, and then Lewis said, ‘That’s not going to go; you’re much too old for a Formula One driver.’
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“And Brad was not impressed by it. He felt that he was in his prime to be a Formula One driver. How they adapted the script was fantastic because it was credible. His role was credible.”
The F1 movie, on which Hamilton served as an executive producer, was a bona fide success, impressing critics, inspiring a new generation of fans and breaking box office records, becoming the highest-grossing sports film of all time, bringing in £467million ($628m) worldwide.
The reception among key paddock figures was positive, too. “We looked at – all of the F1 drivers and the team principals – we looked at it at the premiere in Monaco around the grand prix, and we liked it,” Wolff explained. “There was nothing that was not to be liked. It’s good entertainment, and the revenue that the movie has been generating is phenomenal.”