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Brad Pitt's career took off in the 1990s, but it wasn't until he was offered the role of Detective Mills in David Fincher's Se7en that he felt energized to continue working in Hollywood. After having memorable performances in films like Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise and Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, Pitt exploded in popularity as the angsty and rather emo vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac in 1995's Interview with the Vampire. His next film, Legends of the Fall, earned him his first Golden Globe nomination. But even with his newfound success, Pitt wasn't feeling sure about where he wanted his career to go in Hollywood. 

Speaking to Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast, Pitt recalled where he was at, emotionally, when he first got the script for Se7en.

“I would wake up, I would get a bong load, I would have four Coca-Colas on ice, no food,” Pitt began. “This particular summer, I watched the O.J. [Simpson] trial, and I was just trying to figure out, ‘What do I do next? What do I do next?’” 

“My dear friend and manager and, basically my sister now, Cynthia, sends [the Se7en script] over,” Pitt said. “She says, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ I read the first seven pages, I call her up, I go, ‘Are you kidding me? The cliché old cop wants out, the young cop comes in and he’s looking at his high school football trophies?’ She goes, ‘Just finish it.’ Then I go meet with [David] Finch[er], and he was just talking about films like I’d never heard anyone speak about film. I just got the jones back. Finding that thing kind of… it just reinvigorated what I wanted out of this thing.”

Se7en was David Fincher's directing breakthrough, after his directorial debut, Alien 3, underwhelmed audiences and critics alike. It established Fincher's directing prowess for psychological thrillers, evident in later films like Fight Club, Zodiac, and Gone Girl. Pitt's delivery of the line, "What's in the box?" in Se7en has been seared in the minds of audiences everywhere, and the rest is history. 

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