By February 2020 might feel like it was part of another decade, but if you're able to cast your mind back to that simpler time, the (somehow) 56-year-old actor Brad Pitt had just clinched his Academy Award for Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, a role which he took to playing off-screen at award ceremonies too.
The chiselled, laid-back, wise-cracking Pitt gave us all a twinge of nostalgia, as well as a hope that everything was going to be OK. Fast-forward a few months and the future looks less bright, but at least we still have Brad Pitt.
We've already been treated to a snippet of Pitt during lockdown when he appeared to do the weather on Krasinski's Some Good News show, sticking his head out of the window to say, "Looks, err, pretty good".
Last night the actor graced our screens again during the cold open for a "live, kinda" virtual episode of Saturday Night Live.
Pitt appeared in front of a majestic bookcase set up and in character as Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has become one of America's most prominent and trusted voices during the pandemic.
The skit saw him fact-checking Trump's statements about the virus, interrupting the president saying it would disappear "like a miracle" by adding, "Miracles shouldn't be a plan A."
He also made a joke about Trump's naive optimism about the arrival of a vaccine, saying, "Relatively soon is an interesting phrase. Relative to the entire history of earth? Sure, the vaccine is going to come real fast. But if you were going to tell a friend, ‘I’ll be over relatively soon’ and then showed up a year and a half later, well, your friend may be relatively pissed off."
Inevitably talk turned to Trump's bizarre suggestion last week that injecting disinfectant could kill the virus, with Pitt's Fauci saying, “When I hear things like the virus can be cured if everyone takes the Tide Pod Challenge, I’ll be there to say, ‘Please don’t,’” then taking off his wig to pay tribute to Fauci and the first responders across the country.
His appearance showed that 2020 might be the year of the pandemic, but it's also the year of Brad Pitt 2.0. Considering the actor isn't (yet) on Instagram, it's nice to get some verification he's still healthy and himself.
While the real Dr. Fauci is more than capable of getting his message across to America, perhaps giving Pitt a slot to help spread his words would be no bad thing. Given that Fauci in fact picked Pitt to play him on SNL when speaking to a CNN reporter earlier this month, we like to think he'll be on board with the collaboration.
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