A decade has passed since Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie went from Hollywood’s most closely watched couple to the centre of an extraordinarily public separation. Today, the distance has brought a different kind of reckoning, with people close to both actors offering glimpses of what remained after the headlines moved on. Their relationship had lasted 12 years, their marriage: just two.

And even ten years later, the questions surrounding its collapse have hardly disappeared. Ten years can soften some memories, but the story behind Hollywood’s most scrutinized breakup has proved stubbornly difficult to leave behind.

According to sources speaking to PEOPLE, those close to Brad Pitt now acknowledge that the relationship had been troubled long before its final rupture.

“They were not necessarily as good as they looked to people on the outside. There were a lot of issues that were festering for many years,” a source close to Pitt told the publication. 

The separation followed a private-jet flight on September 14, 2016, after which Jolie filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences." The circumstances surrounding the flight subsequently prompted investigations, with the FBI clearing Pitt and the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services concluding its investigation with no findings of abuse. 

“For a decade she has kept silent, so not to disparage the father of her children. She has kept a dignified silence even while she was being attacked with misinformation,” another source, close to Jolie, told PEOPLE. The divorce itself was finalized in December 2024, though disputes continued.

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Before the marriage became a legal story, Pitt and Jolie had already made another film together - one whose subject now carries an uncomfortable echo.

The 2015 drama By the Sea marked Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s first cinematic collaboration after Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which had its own internal mismatches. Written and directed by Jolie, the film cast the couple as Roland and Vanessa, an American married couple whose troubled relationship begins unraveling during a stay at a French seaside hotel. The film was made in Gozo, Malta, during the couple’s honeymoon in 2014 and was released by Universal Pictures in November 2015. 

Besides its $3 million gross against a $10 million production budget, Jolie told The Hollywood Reported that the film was, "at it’s core, is about grief," stemming from something her mother had to face.

It would ultimately become their last film together, giving the couple’s professional history an unexpectedly poignant final chapter. A decade after their separation, the movie remains less interesting as a prophecy than as a reminder of how little Hollywood ever knew about what was happening behind the image.

For all the years of headlines that followed, the sources’ latest reflections suggest that the most enduring part of the story is not the spectacle of the split. It was the private problems that had been accumulating long before anyone else saw them.

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