Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie‘s eldest son has made a major public decision to distance himself from his famous father.
Maddox Jolie-Pitt, 24, has officially filed legal paperwork to remove “Pitt” from his surname, according to court documents obtained by E! News.
If approved, he will officially be known as Maddox Chivan Jolie.
The step comes after the filmmaker quietly dropped Pitt from his professional name earlier this year while working on his mother’s upcoming film, Couture, where he was credited as “Maddox Jolie”.
Maddox is the eldest of the six children shared by Pitt and Jolie, his siblings are Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne.
Affectionately known as Brangelina, the couple met in 2004 on the set of the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith.and share Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne
By the time the film was released in 2005, Pitt had left Jennifer Aniston to be with Jolie, who had adopted Maddox from a Cambodian orphanage in 2002, when he was seven months old.
The couple married in 2014 at their French chateau, before separating in 2016 following an incident on a private jet as it was ferrying the family from Europe to the US.
Their divorce was finalised in December 2024, following disputes over custody of the children and property, including the French chateau.
Maddox is not the only one of the former couple’s children to publicly distance himself from the Pitt surname, despite its star power.
Last year, daughter Shiloh successfully petitioned a court to legally remove Pitt from her last name shortly after turning 18.
Meanwhile, Zahara introduced herself as Zahara Marley Jolie during a sorority event in 2023, while younger sister Vivienne was credited as “Vivienne Jolie” in the Playbill for the Broadway musical The Outsiders.
Brad Pitt is said to be “hurt” by his children’s decisions to drop his last name, with a source saying the news has been “very difficult.”
“[Brad’s] biggest fear is to be permanently disconnected from the kids because he does want to find a way to make things right,” an insider explained to US Weekly.
“His biggest fear is that too much time is going by and the more time without something happening, the harder it will be to reconcile.”
In the years since the couple’s divorce, details have emerged about their family life.
Pax, whom Jolie adopted in 2007 from Vietnam before Pitt formally adopted him a year later, was first to speak out.
Taking to social media in 2020, he wrote a scorching post on Instagram to mark Father’s Day in the US, in which he referred to Pitt as a “world-class a—hole” and a “despicable human being”.
He also claimed Pitt’s four youngest children “tremble in fear when in your presence”.
All of the children are now reportedly estranged from their dad, who is expected to lose any remaining custody rights when Vivienne and Knox turn 18 in July.
While neither Pitt nor Jolie has publicly commented on Maddox’s filing, the actor previously admitted he struggled following the breakdown of his family.
In a 2017 interview with GQ, Pitt said the divorce forced him to reflect on the kind of father he wanted to be.
“I have to be more for them. I have to show them,” he said at the time.
“And I haven’t been great at it.”
